A lot of reasons people have been using this view are due to the other two views sucking for various reasons... The role for compact view is unclear. Our research suggests that it is something like: the only view that works for browsing a lot of files at once. This is really hard to reconcile with providing good defaults that just work and having consistency with the file chooser.
So you admit people are using the view, it works best for browsing lots of files, and somehow, this means the reason for existence is unclear somehow so you should delete it because you don't use it yourself?
Meanwhile, they try to circle the wagons and discuss what to do to address an issue of dwindling support: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE0ODg Their conclusion including how to address brain drain and exodus of users? *MORE* Gnome 3, stop thinking about the desktop paradigm as much and make it more different, and Gnome hasn't taken over *enough* and needs to be its own OS.
Oh well, guess GNOME will descend into oblivion. They had some neat aspects in Gnome 3, but it's just so hard to deal with some of the intended design choces that they clearly have no intention of revisiting.
So yes, Windows 7 ability to judge/learn relevance could use improvements. However, Windows 8 goes the other way. I did a winkey+search for 'update'. It said 0 results. Well, technicilally it said 0 apps, but my focus was on the lack of useful returns presented Most of the screen real estate dedicated to a message suggesting I was looking for something non-existant. However, on the right side, it provided nothing more than a numeric indication in other categories. If I had puzzled on the search results too long, even that hint auto-hides, assuming you *really* care about the 0 results it can show you.
I don't like how the soft power control has been made less accessible. Now I need to open up 'charms' to get at it.
I don't like the mandatory hot corners when I'm using a mouse or 'older' touch device (incidentally, I evidentally don't even own a pointer device new enough to give me the 'proper' experience).
I don't like how there are two 'internet explorers' that are fundamentally different applications. Launching IE straight from metro doesn't do what I want in the use case you advocate: metro as just a start menu. Fortunately, I don't really care about IE, but I do see this as complicating things as more crippleware metro editions of desktop software pop up.
On metro apps, the mix and match of task switching paradigms between programming models is exceedingly jarring and unnatural. OSX did the full screen mess right: no radically different set of programming interfaces, a more consistent task management interface to manage them along with 'normal' windows. For developers, Metro is an all-or-nothing proposition, in OSX it is much much better.
So all in all, I don't mind the full-screen start screen concept (though some of the widgets are wasteful since I'll never look at them). I wouldn't have begrudged a more intelligent search ordering. But the whole metro concept strikes me as 'throw the assured desktop market under the bus to try to force them to like the interface we've picked as strategic for our phone efforts'.
When you don't own your stack, your 'partner' can quickly become your competitor. Google has a long way to go to get there, but maybe a decade from now partners in Android may find themselves in an awkward position too. It is always possible to take the platform and go home if Google goes against your interests, but the result is fragmentation.
Of course, the challenge would be for all the vendors to competently participate in an endeavor like Debian (i.e. a project that while coherent with neutral governance with a nearly zero chance of *ever* getting the ambition to compete commercially with current-day 'partners'), which seems unlikely.
For one, a modern PC can render the PS2 content at higher resolutions. Sure, the geometric complexity is the same, but the jaggedness is much much better. Also, the HDLoader stuff can be a bit fickle and certainly kludgier to navigate than on a PC.
Finally, the ability to use PS3 bluetooth controllers is nice.
(Note, I don't actually do PCSX2, but this is the sort of thing I get out of other emulators, PCSX2 would be set up too if their Linux support was actually serviceable.
So long as it's trivial to sync to your own privately held computer infrastructure.
For storage, I love the concept of a provider keeping bits (that I have pre-gpged) for my reference. The problem is the trend seems to be more and more limited and convoluted storage capability in favor of more exploitive pricing and schemes (e.g. Amazon changing from a modest capacity to a pathetic song count on their cloud).
For compute, so long as you own the DNS name and all the data needed to reconstruct your presence elsewhere, it gives smaller businesses a chance to have a presence without a lot of up-frot cost. Too bad the trend is overwhelmingly fewer and fewer businesses making this benefit moot.
I bet the hardware vendors love it and are pushing the cloud hype through the tech media
Actually, long term it isn't such a good prognosis for hardware vendors. The big winners (EC2 for example) do not bother investing in low-level resiliancy, meaning machines can fail at will without breaking Amazon promises. The guidance is that you, as service architect, should architect your solution for failure anyway, so why should amazon bother paying more to cover a risk that is best handled at app level? The bullet proof hardware configurations have very high profit margin.
The other high profit margin area is manageability and serviceability. When you need to recover quickly from failure, quick identification and replacement is key. This can relate to the above point, where a hardware outage duration could in theory be tied to business-critical data or compute time. Also, given economies of scale, a small setup may have unacceptable performance degradation without full capacity, in a shared facility economies of scale mean diminished capacity is less likely to be noticed, and a week or two of turnaround time for replaced failed components may not be a big deal.
The big hardware names are using the word 'cloud' to entice companies to move more and more into the datacenter, but keep it private so that those economies of scale don't obsolete the value of their service.
My overall take is simple, it's very much like renting a car. If you don't need the full capacity of even one server, then a hosting service may be appropriate. If you, however, need multiple racks of equipment, it's likely that cloud is actually a losing proposition. There is a grey area for debate in the middle.
They have increased, but not *nearly* so much as film production costs have increased. To pick two examples, Call of Duty: Black ops had a reported budget of $10 million. Despite being a tad older now, it still is priced at $30 a pop on amazon. How to train your dragon had a budget of $165 million and can be had for $20 a copy on Blu-Ray, in line with moderately new releases. The games industry is making the *MPAA* look reasonable by comparison. Per-unit pricing is what *really* frustrates people, though for the sake of drama throwing out the $66 billion is more interesting. I don't think anyone would begrudge $66 billion to the industry of the pricing and behaviors were a bit reasonable.
Also, gamers are still satisfied with sprites (see many popular IOS/Android games) and modest-detail spaceships (see sins of a solar empire). There is a very profitable market segment that care more about the gameplay than artistry. There is certainly a market for visually overwhelming gaming, but that does not preclude people actually looking for a fun game to play.
Really, the only digital distribution industry that I think has their stuff *mostly* together is the recording industry. Legitimate DRM-free copies of music to actually *own* at reasonable pricing, ad-supported streaming. RIAA lawyers still go overboard in some cases, but the general business model has gotten pretty damn consumer friendly. Meanwhile ebooks, movies, and games are still dominated by DRM and hubris around pricing that interfeces with pricing for optimal revenue. ('if someone doesn't want to spend $60 to appreciate my work, they don't deserve to'). There are bright points (Frictional games DRM-free donloads, Baen e-books, don't know any movie examples), but in general I'm looking forward to a day these other industries mature like the music industry did.
Game publishers price in a way that pretty much demands a secondary market. The path to make used sales irrelevant is easy: lower prices so there isn't appreciable profit to be had by trying to facilitate a used market. People don't wan't to pay $60 on a game they'll, on average, maybe play for a week before being done with it. This is the most effective strategy that can possible be done.
On gamestop's end, the delta between the money they give for someone trading in and the price they put on it is huge. That delta is likely the bit that the game industry finds problematic. Percentage wise, it's far more severe than other used markets get away with (a used car sees maybe 15-40% markup between trade-in and resale, gamestop is more on the order of 100-300% from what I understand).
If publishers decreased their price just enough and not too much, they'll be able to get as much, if not more, overall revenue in the gaming industry without leaving room for a secondary market. If revenue is flat compared to the current circumstances, at least Gamestop's markup would be going to publishers/developers instead of Gamestop.
Incidently, if they *did* succeed in eliminating the secondary market without taking steps to adjust pricing, revenue would take a potentially sharp dip. It might be tempting to think the money spent would be constant, that people would just buy one new $60 game instead of 3 used $20 games. However, people tend to get more careless with their spending when spending in small chunks, so they may be more rulectant to even buy one $60 title than five $20 titles spread out over a bit of time.
One, I plug in a USB device in Linux, it 'just works'. MS comes close, but there is this large lag while it pesters me about installing drivers even for simple HID devices. If I should plug in that same device later, I better hit the same port if I want fast usage or else, the 'installing drivers' dance recurs because of the way the USB bus enumerated differently this time.
I dread when my family mentions they can't get their system to boot. Inevitably they have some malware. I thought 'hey, Microsoft Security Essentials should preclude this', nope, they got malware infected again. I know this particular aspect is *mostly* MS being a victim of their own success, but having admin be only a click away because of the mess they still have inherited from the Win9X days exacerbates the problem.
Finally, Windows itself leaves much to be desired. I like being able to alt-click drag-resize windows. I like having an 'expose-like' window navigation. I like having an actually competent multi-window terminal with good keyboard shortcuts. I like not being treated like a potential criminal by having to jump through hoops if my hardware configuration changes enough to make windows activation be dubious of what I've done, and entering tedious long product keys during install. I like being on a platform that gives me an option to continue moving forward if my chosen OS provider does something silly like a Metro UI against my desires. I like being on a platform where one small group's agenda is always subject to worsening my experience to advance their goal. I like running a myth frontend that doesn't crash every 5 minutes (not *windows* crashing, but MythTV's windows port is very crashy). I like having most everything I could want a yum or apt-get away.
OK, you're making two different arguments here. One, you're telling me that Valve needs to create a Linux-based console and port all their games to it. I'm dubious that the marketplace has room for another console, but what do I know?
There may not be room for another console, but I could see Steambox effectively knocking Sony out of the market, for one. If PS4 launches with no backwards compatibility, I could see a Valve branded offering succeeding. PS3 has already proven itself to be no where near the powerhouse that PS2 was in the market. Even MS might be threatened, they do have Halo as first-party but most everything else they have of note is third party. Once upon a time, it was presumed that Sega surely couldn't be ejected from the market, and yet they were.
The other issue you raise is more relevant to my argument:
I guess I just wanted to clarify I did not mean that Valve would focus exclusively on the Steambox, just that they could go up against Xbox competently, and given that Xbox is not a monopoly today, I doubt it can become one in the near future.
The point being is the premise of the article would be that Nokia would have succeeded regardless, allowing it to be a surefire way to give success to a failing attempt of a company to get into a market. Nokia going with Intel over ARM could likely be just as self-destructive as them going with MS. There's no evidence to suggest Intel/Nokia would bail out Intel's presence any more than it bailed out MS presence in the market.
Of course, it's mostly moot now, Nokia has very very little reputation left, MS partnership destroyed what residual stuff was left. Of course, Nokia was *already* getting pretty desperate as Android and IOS platforms took off, they just picked a steeper path to the bottom rather than be 'just another Android handset maker'.
Given that they more than *anyone* need nVidia and ATI proprietary drivers, trying to start from scratch with no proprietary vendor support (a la Wayland), ditching Xorg would be an ill-advised move.
Now in terms of layers *above* Xorg, I could see them writing a very minimalist fullscreen oriented window manager. In terms of published APIs, they do effectively control SDL now. With SDL/OpenGL in hand, a game developer mostly doesn't need to know/care that Xorg is the backend (in fact, the vast majority of modern Linux graphical source code lacks any direct Xlib API calls in it). They may want to endorse either GTK or Qt as their recommended Toolkit for out-of-game interfaces to make it more comprehensive.
-Steambox. If they exploit this as a way to actually own the platform in their own console, then pretty much by definition they have to have their 'own' distro. -*If* they really want to make a ballsy move and try to move people off of Windows by doing something like releasing a very anticipated game Linux-only, packaging it with a LiveUSB steam platform would be a way to facilitate less savvy users getting into it.
This does *not* mean they support their own distro to the exclusion of others, it just means they have some particular strategies that could strongly suggest their own flavor of a distro.
This would probably not be a brand new distro that's particularly different. This could very likely be a partnership with the likes of Canonical ('Steambuntu'), where the OSS pieces pretty match verbatim the upstream distro, just different configuration choices to get you to Steam's set-top like interface quicker.
A Valve-Canonical partnership could also have very interesting long-term ambitions. For now, the obvious implications are Valve getting some logistics assistance in exchange for dramatically increasing the value of Ubuntu's desktop offering. In the medium term, this could be a way of Valve getting into the console space (which they have had an inconsistent experience trying to do so atop other vendor hardware). Keep in mind that in recent years Canonical has also expressed a dream of getting into TV (pretty highly criticized for showing a pretty vanilla SamyGO and making it seem they did it all on their own). A steambox would be a way for them to get there.
Now in the long term, Ubuntu has also expressed strong desire for uptake in the tablet space (presumably phone space too). I don't know if Valve has mentioned it explicitly, but they probably also are very concerned if Android and IOS tablets erode the desktop space away. There is an incredible long shot that success on desktop and set-top box world could translate into tablets, since that market still seems uncertain outside of Apple. They could also find themselves in an interestingly advantageous position should Apple start doing an integrated television offering to enable other television vendors a viable answer. Google pushed it to some degree, but I think the vendors are disinterested because they aren't particularly threatened so each has a pretty half-assed platform rather than embracing any google offering. If Steambox is established, a TV vendor might see the game catalog as more befitting 60" screens than Android offerings.
The premise is flawed. If Nokia were the holy grail of getting your foot in the door to the mobile arena, MS would have fared better by now.
Nokia did exceptionally well and clearly 'got' one generation of phone devices right. That success has not translated to the current state of affairs. If it had, then there wouldn't be so many opportunities for other vendors to exploit Nokia desperation to use their name to advance their agenda.
Because the xBox market isn't nearly as entrenched as the desktop market, so a monopoly is unlinkely in the near future. Valve has enough time to get a SteamBox offering to compete head to head with xbox before sony quite goes completely down in flames in their console strategy.
Besides, in terms of Valve as a game development company, I wouldn't be surprised if their titles more than others are porportionally more successful on the PC market than console market, giving them a vested interest in keeping a real desktop oriented market alive.
Verry succintly put. Before id there was no market for FPS games, now it's the most dominant genre (for better or for worse). Carmack really needs to embrace this sort of philosophy if he ever wants to escape the stigma of being out-competed in the very genre he mostly created.
That was from a time when he was riding high on success from immensely popular titles. Now his efforts are lost in a sea of far more prominent and profitable titles, a name mostly known as a former success, though marginally more successful in recent years than Romero. Finding oneself in that predicament really does something to your sense of practicality.
The distinction between a gaming console and an OS is that the OS doesn't become a 'gaming' platform until someone takes it seriously as such. In the gaming console, you at least *know* the whole point is to facilitate gaming and that you at least have one partner supporting the platform with goals that roughly align to yours. Besides, it is a chicken and egg problem for console manufacturers too. Sure, did they 'know' the market for the PS3 before launch, no, but there was this *huge* PS2 market in which Sony had established their name thoroughly. Nintendo hasn't had to prove they are a viable gaming company in decades (not perhaps as successful as they would like at times, but always strong). MS is the most recent break into the market. While they weren't in on the market, they did have this blatantly obvious reputation built upon complete ownership of the desktop gaming platform. Therefore, developers could be reasonably confident but only based on an existing decade of history. Even *then* things were so difficult that MS had to go *way* in the red in their console endeavor to get traction.
2. High potential risks
While that is true, I'd argue the distinctions between OSX and Linux are less critical for most games (which create their own UI libraries for example). We are also in a world where developers are less afraid than they ever have been to support multiplatform, thanks in no small part to games on consoles and phones.
3. Lack of proof of a market.
Back to chicken and egg. The closest case of an *attempt* in reasonable history is the humble indie bundle. No you can't invoke Lokisoft, things were way too different back then. Also, you presume that a gaming revolution can't possible come about at the hands of independent game devlopment companies. Particularly in the digital distribution age, the needs of developers to bank upon game publisher companies for logistics is reduced. Can they get A-list actors to voice charecters, can they devote enough manpower to create artwork to support highly detailed games, no, but they can still make pretty damn fun games.
4. Low first mover advantage
Probably your most viable point, but this presumes that Valve is primarily a game development company. Valve is increasingly a game distribution company, selling *other* people's game more frequently than their own as of late. If it weren't for steam, we'd probably have HL2:ep3 by now. First mover advantage for their increasingly lucrative business of selling other people's game is *huge*. People *want* to deal with a single vendor so long as that vendor provides enough variety. While anyone can (and many want to) do their own 'Steam', those efforts are frequently rejected by the userbase, specifically because they don't see why they just don't work with Steam. MS and Apple have first-party advantage, and their offerings have a very high risk of displacing Steam's long-time advantage they got by being a first-mover in the digital distribution game, Linux is a hope to retain value in Steam in the face of that reality. This also discounts the fact that Valve's staff was likely chomping at the bit to enable this effort. Most accounts have people doing this on the side as a hobby before business side accepted the efforts.
First, the premise that there are no gamers on linux, therefore, don't create games on linux is a chicken and egg problem. Game *developers* have to make an unprofiitable leap of fait to get the ball rolling. Given a large potential base of users that grudgingly tolerate MS platform (potentially exacerbated by Win8), giving them an out may be sufficient.
As Steam has taken on a life of it's own, Valve seems to be less and less about developing games and more and more about being a marketplace for digitally purchased gaming content. This presumably means that revenue from that endeavor is dwarfing what they historically have gotten from developing games, *despite* having some of the most acclaimed titles of all time. Both Apple and MS threaten that by wanting to push their own app distribution facility as first-party, reducing the value of the Steam offering. It is in Valve's *long* term interests to try to push users away from platforms like Windows and OSX onto a platform that is the least likely to have a single coherent strategy lock out things like Steam. To this end, Valve could even do something insane, like release HL2: Ep3 as a Linux exclusive. Would that be catastrophic for the sales of that title? Absolutely. Would it simultaneously bring in a critical mass of gamers to Linux, a platform where Valve may continue to thrive in an 'app store' world? Very possible.
Finally, sometimes it's not *purely* a straightforward business call. For reference, see Blizzard. Blizzard titles have consistently supported MacOS since 1994, even in the most pessimitistic times for the platform. It's quite possible the Mac versions of many of their titles 15 years ago lost money compared to effort required to do it, but they presumably maintained that effort out of love of the platform or continued need to prove they can be a multi-platform company. Keep in mind that while Linux isn't that directly popular (ignoring ubiquitous embedded application and android), it is immensely popular amongst developers and computing enthusiasts. That's the same market that companies like Valve hire from, and developers likely would support Linux as a labor of love.
Sometimes a conversation will involve a lot of things that copy and paste is critical for. It also allows one to be a bit more multitasking on either end of the conversation. Particularly if you are using the interaction largely as a pass-through for concrete error-messages/codes and commands to execute on a cli, chat is best.
Frequently in a conversation, I arrange to actually talk to the person (regardless of which end of the conversation I'm on). This happens when a situation is a bit more murky so there is no concrete place to gather failure data, or if a solution warrants an explanation of how things are the way they are and the intent embodied in the steps to resolution. This could be because the fix process is involved and will require a bit of adaptability on the problematic side or just a way to have the person afflicted learn and avoid/fix similar sorts of situations in the future.
Carmack covered this, the latency on the HMZ-T1 is extraordinarily high. For movie playback and typical 3d gaming (the controls and results are so disconnected, we don't have such a strong physiological expectation of view moving with our controller input), no big deal. Problematic, however, for head tracking where our systems *really* expect the view and head movements to correlate closely and the lag is noticable.
Yes, but that's because MS is starting to compete with Valve. That in and of itself doesn't make the initiative explicitly bad for the customer, but it is the primary thorn in Valve's side.
Customer's of course have reasons other than UI to be concerned. SecureBoot and what MS' plans around 'first-party' hardware ultimately mean for the industry are two particularly keen ones, but I don't know if that figures prominently into things Valve cares about.
Before the message was consistently 'you won't need support, our stuff is so effortless'. That's a much more compelling sort of message to send. The frantic tone of these ads actually evokes a message more like 'our experience is just like everyone else's'. Maybe you say that's a necessary midset to entertain to play in the same game as the other PC manufacturers, but if image-wise they are on equal footing, they will lose on pricing. Otherwise, they start being price competitive in which case their widely envied margins get flushed down the drain.
I'd say the failure is that it suggests you need to either be or have the help of a genious to understand and use the product. This is a departure from the previous messaging that was pretty consistently suggesting a self-sufficient experience for the common person. It wasn't saying everyone had to be geeks, it was saying no one had to be a geek or even needed a geek to help them.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy crap:
A lot of reasons people have been using this view are due to the other two views sucking for various reasons ... The role for compact view is unclear. Our research suggests that it is something like: the only view that works for browsing a lot of files at once. This is really hard to reconcile with providing good defaults that just work and having consistency with the file chooser.
So you admit people are using the view, it works best for browsing lots of files, and somehow, this means the reason for existence is unclear somehow so you should delete it because you don't use it yourself?
Meanwhile, they try to circle the wagons and discuss what to do to address an issue of dwindling support:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE0ODg
Their conclusion including how to address brain drain and exodus of users? *MORE* Gnome 3, stop thinking about the desktop paradigm as much and make it more different, and Gnome hasn't taken over *enough* and needs to be its own OS.
Oh well, guess GNOME will descend into oblivion. They had some neat aspects in Gnome 3, but it's just so hard to deal with some of the intended design choces that they clearly have no intention of revisiting.
So yes, Windows 7 ability to judge/learn relevance could use improvements. However, Windows 8 goes the other way. I did a winkey+search for 'update'. It said 0 results. Well, technicilally it said 0 apps, but my focus was on the lack of useful returns presented Most of the screen real estate dedicated to a message suggesting I was looking for something non-existant. However, on the right side, it provided nothing more than a numeric indication in other categories. If I had puzzled on the search results too long, even that hint auto-hides, assuming you *really* care about the 0 results it can show you.
I don't like how the soft power control has been made less accessible. Now I need to open up 'charms' to get at it.
I don't like the mandatory hot corners when I'm using a mouse or 'older' touch device (incidentally, I evidentally don't even own a pointer device new enough to give me the 'proper' experience).
I don't like how there are two 'internet explorers' that are fundamentally different applications. Launching IE straight from metro doesn't do what I want in the use case you advocate: metro as just a start menu. Fortunately, I don't really care about IE, but I do see this as complicating things as more crippleware metro editions of desktop software pop up.
On metro apps, the mix and match of task switching paradigms between programming models is exceedingly jarring and unnatural. OSX did the full screen mess right: no radically different set of programming interfaces, a more consistent task management interface to manage them along with 'normal' windows. For developers, Metro is an all-or-nothing proposition, in OSX it is much much better.
So all in all, I don't mind the full-screen start screen concept (though some of the widgets are wasteful since I'll never look at them). I wouldn't have begrudged a more intelligent search ordering. But the whole metro concept strikes me as 'throw the assured desktop market under the bus to try to force them to like the interface we've picked as strategic for our phone efforts'.
When you don't own your stack, your 'partner' can quickly become your competitor. Google has a long way to go to get there, but maybe a decade from now partners in Android may find themselves in an awkward position too. It is always possible to take the platform and go home if Google goes against your interests, but the result is fragmentation.
Of course, the challenge would be for all the vendors to competently participate in an endeavor like Debian (i.e. a project that while coherent with neutral governance with a nearly zero chance of *ever* getting the ambition to compete commercially with current-day 'partners'), which seems unlikely.
For one, a modern PC can render the PS2 content at higher resolutions. Sure, the geometric complexity is the same, but the jaggedness is much much better. Also, the HDLoader stuff can be a bit fickle and certainly kludgier to navigate than on a PC.
Finally, the ability to use PS3 bluetooth controllers is nice.
(Note, I don't actually do PCSX2, but this is the sort of thing I get out of other emulators, PCSX2 would be set up too if their Linux support was actually serviceable.
So long as it's trivial to sync to your own privately held computer infrastructure.
For storage, I love the concept of a provider keeping bits (that I have pre-gpged) for my reference. The problem is the trend seems to be more and more limited and convoluted storage capability in favor of more exploitive pricing and schemes (e.g. Amazon changing from a modest capacity to a pathetic song count on their cloud).
For compute, so long as you own the DNS name and all the data needed to reconstruct your presence elsewhere, it gives smaller businesses a chance to have a presence without a lot of up-frot cost. Too bad the trend is overwhelmingly fewer and fewer businesses making this benefit moot.
I bet the hardware vendors love it and are pushing the cloud hype through the tech media
Actually, long term it isn't such a good prognosis for hardware vendors. The big winners (EC2 for example) do not bother investing in low-level resiliancy, meaning machines can fail at will without breaking Amazon promises. The guidance is that you, as service architect, should architect your solution for failure anyway, so why should amazon bother paying more to cover a risk that is best handled at app level? The bullet proof hardware configurations have very high profit margin.
The other high profit margin area is manageability and serviceability. When you need to recover quickly from failure, quick identification and replacement is key. This can relate to the above point, where a hardware outage duration could in theory be tied to business-critical data or compute time. Also, given economies of scale, a small setup may have unacceptable performance degradation without full capacity, in a shared facility economies of scale mean diminished capacity is less likely to be noticed, and a week or two of turnaround time for replaced failed components may not be a big deal.
The big hardware names are using the word 'cloud' to entice companies to move more and more into the datacenter, but keep it private so that those economies of scale don't obsolete the value of their service.
My overall take is simple, it's very much like renting a car. If you don't need the full capacity of even one server, then a hosting service may be appropriate. If you, however, need multiple racks of equipment, it's likely that cloud is actually a losing proposition. There is a grey area for debate in the middle.
They have increased, but not *nearly* so much as film production costs have increased. To pick two examples, Call of Duty: Black ops had a reported budget of $10 million. Despite being a tad older now, it still is priced at $30 a pop on amazon. How to train your dragon had a budget of $165 million and can be had for $20 a copy on Blu-Ray, in line with moderately new releases. The games industry is making the *MPAA* look reasonable by comparison. Per-unit pricing is what *really* frustrates people, though for the sake of drama throwing out the $66 billion is more interesting. I don't think anyone would begrudge $66 billion to the industry of the pricing and behaviors were a bit reasonable.
Also, gamers are still satisfied with sprites (see many popular IOS/Android games) and modest-detail spaceships (see sins of a solar empire). There is a very profitable market segment that care more about the gameplay than artistry. There is certainly a market for visually overwhelming gaming, but that does not preclude people actually looking for a fun game to play.
Really, the only digital distribution industry that I think has their stuff *mostly* together is the recording industry. Legitimate DRM-free copies of music to actually *own* at reasonable pricing, ad-supported streaming. RIAA lawyers still go overboard in some cases, but the general business model has gotten pretty damn consumer friendly. Meanwhile ebooks, movies, and games are still dominated by DRM and hubris around pricing that interfeces with pricing for optimal revenue. ('if someone doesn't want to spend $60 to appreciate my work, they don't deserve to'). There are bright points (Frictional games DRM-free donloads, Baen e-books, don't know any movie examples), but in general I'm looking forward to a day these other industries mature like the music industry did.
Game publishers price in a way that pretty much demands a secondary market. The path to make used sales irrelevant is easy: lower prices so there isn't appreciable profit to be had by trying to facilitate a used market. People don't wan't to pay $60 on a game they'll, on average, maybe play for a week before being done with it. This is the most effective strategy that can possible be done.
On gamestop's end, the delta between the money they give for someone trading in and the price they put on it is huge. That delta is likely the bit that the game industry finds problematic. Percentage wise, it's far more severe than other used markets get away with (a used car sees maybe 15-40% markup between trade-in and resale, gamestop is more on the order of 100-300% from what I understand).
If publishers decreased their price just enough and not too much, they'll be able to get as much, if not more, overall revenue in the gaming industry without leaving room for a secondary market. If revenue is flat compared to the current circumstances, at least Gamestop's markup would be going to publishers/developers instead of Gamestop.
Incidently, if they *did* succeed in eliminating the secondary market without taking steps to adjust pricing, revenue would take a potentially sharp dip. It might be tempting to think the money spent would be constant, that people would just buy one new $60 game instead of 3 used $20 games. However, people tend to get more careless with their spending when spending in small chunks, so they may be more rulectant to even buy one $60 title than five $20 titles spread out over a bit of time.
See, that has *not* been my experience.
One, I plug in a USB device in Linux, it 'just works'. MS comes close, but there is this large lag while it pesters me about installing drivers even for simple HID devices. If I should plug in that same device later, I better hit the same port if I want fast usage or else, the 'installing drivers' dance recurs because of the way the USB bus enumerated differently this time.
I dread when my family mentions they can't get their system to boot. Inevitably they have some malware. I thought 'hey, Microsoft Security Essentials should preclude this', nope, they got malware infected again. I know this particular aspect is *mostly* MS being a victim of their own success, but having admin be only a click away because of the mess they still have inherited from the Win9X days exacerbates the problem.
Finally, Windows itself leaves much to be desired. I like being able to alt-click drag-resize windows. I like having an 'expose-like' window navigation. I like having an actually competent multi-window terminal with good keyboard shortcuts. I like not being treated like a potential criminal by having to jump through hoops if my hardware configuration changes enough to make windows activation be dubious of what I've done, and entering tedious long product keys during install. I like being on a platform that gives me an option to continue moving forward if my chosen OS provider does something silly like a Metro UI against my desires. I like being on a platform where one small group's agenda is always subject to worsening my experience to advance their goal. I like running a myth frontend that doesn't crash every 5 minutes (not *windows* crashing, but MythTV's windows port is very crashy). I like having most everything I could want a yum or apt-get away.
OK, you're making two different arguments here. One, you're telling me that Valve needs to create a Linux-based console and port all their games to it. I'm dubious that the marketplace has room for another console, but what do I know?
There may not be room for another console, but I could see Steambox effectively knocking Sony out of the market, for one. If PS4 launches with no backwards compatibility, I could see a Valve branded offering succeeding. PS3 has already proven itself to be no where near the powerhouse that PS2 was in the market. Even MS might be threatened, they do have Halo as first-party but most everything else they have of note is third party. Once upon a time, it was presumed that Sega surely couldn't be ejected from the market, and yet they were.
The other issue you raise is more relevant to my argument:
I guess I just wanted to clarify I did not mean that Valve would focus exclusively on the Steambox, just that they could go up against Xbox competently, and given that Xbox is not a monopoly today, I doubt it can become one in the near future.
The point being is the premise of the article would be that Nokia would have succeeded regardless, allowing it to be a surefire way to give success to a failing attempt of a company to get into a market. Nokia going with Intel over ARM could likely be just as self-destructive as them going with MS. There's no evidence to suggest Intel/Nokia would bail out Intel's presence any more than it bailed out MS presence in the market.
Of course, it's mostly moot now, Nokia has very very little reputation left, MS partnership destroyed what residual stuff was left. Of course, Nokia was *already* getting pretty desperate as Android and IOS platforms took off, they just picked a steeper path to the bottom rather than be 'just another Android handset maker'.
Given that they more than *anyone* need nVidia and ATI proprietary drivers, trying to start from scratch with no proprietary vendor support (a la Wayland), ditching Xorg would be an ill-advised move.
Now in terms of layers *above* Xorg, I could see them writing a very minimalist fullscreen oriented window manager. In terms of published APIs, they do effectively control SDL now. With SDL/OpenGL in hand, a game developer mostly doesn't need to know/care that Xorg is the backend (in fact, the vast majority of modern Linux graphical source code lacks any direct Xlib API calls in it). They may want to endorse either GTK or Qt as their recommended Toolkit for out-of-game interfaces to make it more comprehensive.
-Steambox. If they exploit this as a way to actually own the platform in their own console, then pretty much by definition they have to have their 'own' distro.
-*If* they really want to make a ballsy move and try to move people off of Windows by doing something like releasing a very anticipated game Linux-only, packaging it with a LiveUSB steam platform would be a way to facilitate less savvy users getting into it.
This does *not* mean they support their own distro to the exclusion of others, it just means they have some particular strategies that could strongly suggest their own flavor of a distro.
This would probably not be a brand new distro that's particularly different. This could very likely be a partnership with the likes of Canonical ('Steambuntu'), where the OSS pieces pretty match verbatim the upstream distro, just different configuration choices to get you to Steam's set-top like interface quicker.
A Valve-Canonical partnership could also have very interesting long-term ambitions. For now, the obvious implications are Valve getting some logistics assistance in exchange for dramatically increasing the value of Ubuntu's desktop offering.
In the medium term, this could be a way of Valve getting into the console space (which they have had an inconsistent experience trying to do so atop other vendor hardware). Keep in mind that in recent years Canonical has also expressed a dream of getting into TV (pretty highly criticized for showing a pretty vanilla SamyGO and making it seem they did it all on their own). A steambox would be a way for them to get there.
Now in the long term, Ubuntu has also expressed strong desire for uptake in the tablet space (presumably phone space too). I don't know if Valve has mentioned it explicitly, but they probably also are very concerned if Android and IOS tablets erode the desktop space away. There is an incredible long shot that success on desktop and set-top box world could translate into tablets, since that market still seems uncertain outside of Apple. They could also find themselves in an interestingly advantageous position should Apple start doing an integrated television offering to enable other television vendors a viable answer. Google pushed it to some degree, but I think the vendors are disinterested because they aren't particularly threatened so each has a pretty half-assed platform rather than embracing any google offering. If Steambox is established, a TV vendor might see the game catalog as more befitting 60" screens than Android offerings.
I cannot walk into PCWorld and buy a Linux OS DVD
Even if you could, it wouldn't make a difference one way or another. Almost no one does anything but take what was preloaded on their system.
The premise is flawed. If Nokia were the holy grail of getting your foot in the door to the mobile arena, MS would have fared better by now.
Nokia did exceptionally well and clearly 'got' one generation of phone devices right. That success has not translated to the current state of affairs. If it had, then there wouldn't be so many opportunities for other vendors to exploit Nokia desperation to use their name to advance their agenda.
Because the xBox market isn't nearly as entrenched as the desktop market, so a monopoly is unlinkely in the near future. Valve has enough time to get a SteamBox offering to compete head to head with xbox before sony quite goes completely down in flames in their console strategy.
Besides, in terms of Valve as a game development company, I wouldn't be surprised if their titles more than others are porportionally more successful on the PC market than console market, giving them a vested interest in keeping a real desktop oriented market alive.
Verry succintly put. Before id there was no market for FPS games, now it's the most dominant genre (for better or for worse). Carmack really needs to embrace this sort of philosophy if he ever wants to escape the stigma of being out-competed in the very genre he mostly created.
What happened to you, John?
That was from a time when he was riding high on success from immensely popular titles. Now his efforts are lost in a sea of far more prominent and profitable titles, a name mostly known as a former success, though marginally more successful in recent years than Romero. Finding oneself in that predicament really does something to your sense of practicality.
1. History
The distinction between a gaming console and an OS is that the OS doesn't become a 'gaming' platform until someone takes it seriously as such. In the gaming console, you at least *know* the whole point is to facilitate gaming and that you at least have one partner supporting the platform with goals that roughly align to yours. Besides, it is a chicken and egg problem for console manufacturers too. Sure, did they 'know' the market for the PS3 before launch, no, but there was this *huge* PS2 market in which Sony had established their name thoroughly. Nintendo hasn't had to prove they are a viable gaming company in decades (not perhaps as successful as they would like at times, but always strong). MS is the most recent break into the market. While they weren't in on the market, they did have this blatantly obvious reputation built upon complete ownership of the desktop gaming platform. Therefore, developers could be reasonably confident but only based on an existing decade of history. Even *then* things were so difficult that MS had to go *way* in the red in their console endeavor to get traction.
2. High potential risks
While that is true, I'd argue the distinctions between OSX and Linux are less critical for most games (which create their own UI libraries for example). We are also in a world where developers are less afraid than they ever have been to support multiplatform, thanks in no small part to games on consoles and phones.
3. Lack of proof of a market.
Back to chicken and egg. The closest case of an *attempt* in reasonable history is the humble indie bundle. No you can't invoke Lokisoft, things were way too different back then. Also, you presume that a gaming revolution can't possible come about at the hands of independent game devlopment companies. Particularly in the digital distribution age, the needs of developers to bank upon game publisher companies for logistics is reduced. Can they get A-list actors to voice charecters, can they devote enough manpower to create artwork to support highly detailed games, no, but they can still make pretty damn fun games.
4. Low first mover advantage
Probably your most viable point, but this presumes that Valve is primarily a game development company. Valve is increasingly a game distribution company, selling *other* people's game more frequently than their own as of late. If it weren't for steam, we'd probably have HL2:ep3 by now. First mover advantage for their increasingly lucrative business of selling other people's game is *huge*. People *want* to deal with a single vendor so long as that vendor provides enough variety. While anyone can (and many want to) do their own 'Steam', those efforts are frequently rejected by the userbase, specifically because they don't see why they just don't work with Steam. MS and Apple have first-party advantage, and their offerings have a very high risk of displacing Steam's long-time advantage they got by being a first-mover in the digital distribution game, Linux is a hope to retain value in Steam in the face of that reality. This also discounts the fact that Valve's staff was likely chomping at the bit to enable this effort. Most accounts have people doing this on the side as a hobby before business side accepted the efforts.
First, the premise that there are no gamers on linux, therefore, don't create games on linux is a chicken and egg problem. Game *developers* have to make an unprofiitable leap of fait to get the ball rolling. Given a large potential base of users that grudgingly tolerate MS platform (potentially exacerbated by Win8), giving them an out may be sufficient.
As Steam has taken on a life of it's own, Valve seems to be less and less about developing games and more and more about being a marketplace for digitally purchased gaming content. This presumably means that revenue from that endeavor is dwarfing what they historically have gotten from developing games, *despite* having some of the most acclaimed titles of all time. Both Apple and MS threaten that by wanting to push their own app distribution facility as first-party, reducing the value of the Steam offering. It is in Valve's *long* term interests to try to push users away from platforms like Windows and OSX onto a platform that is the least likely to have a single coherent strategy lock out things like Steam. To this end, Valve could even do something insane, like release HL2: Ep3 as a Linux exclusive. Would that be catastrophic for the sales of that title? Absolutely. Would it simultaneously bring in a critical mass of gamers to Linux, a platform where Valve may continue to thrive in an 'app store' world? Very possible.
Finally, sometimes it's not *purely* a straightforward business call. For reference, see Blizzard. Blizzard titles have consistently supported MacOS since 1994, even in the most pessimitistic times for the platform. It's quite possible the Mac versions of many of their titles 15 years ago lost money compared to effort required to do it, but they presumably maintained that effort out of love of the platform or continued need to prove they can be a multi-platform company. Keep in mind that while Linux isn't that directly popular (ignoring ubiquitous embedded application and android), it is immensely popular amongst developers and computing enthusiasts. That's the same market that companies like Valve hire from, and developers likely would support Linux as a labor of love.
Sometimes a conversation will involve a lot of things that copy and paste is critical for. It also allows one to be a bit more multitasking on either end of the conversation. Particularly if you are using the interaction largely as a pass-through for concrete error-messages/codes and commands to execute on a cli, chat is best.
Frequently in a conversation, I arrange to actually talk to the person (regardless of which end of the conversation I'm on). This happens when a situation is a bit more murky so there is no concrete place to gather failure data, or if a solution warrants an explanation of how things are the way they are and the intent embodied in the steps to resolution. This could be because the fix process is involved and will require a bit of adaptability on the problematic side or just a way to have the person afflicted learn and avoid/fix similar sorts of situations in the future.
Carmack covered this, the latency on the HMZ-T1 is extraordinarily high. For movie playback and typical 3d gaming (the controls and results are so disconnected, we don't have such a strong physiological expectation of view moving with our controller input), no big deal. Problematic, however, for head tracking where our systems *really* expect the view and head movements to correlate closely and the lag is noticable.
Yes, but that's because MS is starting to compete with Valve. That in and of itself doesn't make the initiative explicitly bad for the customer, but it is the primary thorn in Valve's side.
Customer's of course have reasons other than UI to be concerned. SecureBoot and what MS' plans around 'first-party' hardware ultimately mean for the industry are two particularly keen ones, but I don't know if that figures prominently into things Valve cares about.
Before the message was consistently 'you won't need support, our stuff is so effortless'. That's a much more compelling sort of message to send. The frantic tone of these ads actually evokes a message more like 'our experience is just like everyone else's'. Maybe you say that's a necessary midset to entertain to play in the same game as the other PC manufacturers, but if image-wise they are on equal footing, they will lose on pricing. Otherwise, they start being price competitive in which case their widely envied margins get flushed down the drain.
The PC/Windows market may not be worth it.
I'd say the failure is that it suggests you need to either be or have the help of a genious to understand and use the product. This is a departure from the previous messaging that was pretty consistently suggesting a self-sufficient experience for the common person. It wasn't saying everyone had to be geeks, it was saying no one had to be a geek or even needed a geek to help them.