Valve isn't a small company. They have multiple teams, and they work on different projects. TF2 was ready before Episode 2, and it would seem that Portal was finished quite some time ago. Episode 2 is what has been holding everything back, so it would seem that not having TF2/Portal probably wouldn't have sped up the release.
The episodes cost $20 each. There are three of them. Together they constitute what, ~18 hours of FPS gameplay? That's about the length of a full game. Three episodic games, $60 total. That's also about the cost of a full game.
So, all told, you're getting about the same amount of gameplay as a full game for about the same cost. How is that "milking more money out of consumers"?
Besides, Valve tends to also release episodes with other content bundled in. Episode two, for example, will also be available in a package called "The Orange Box", which includes (for $45) Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode 1, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. Even for me, who already owns the first two items in that list, $45 for Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal, that's a very good deal. I'd easily spend the $45 just on Team Fortress alone.
If anything, episodic content is the OPPOSITE of milking more money from consumers. In a similar way to the Shareware days of old, a gamer can purchase the first episode, and use that to decide if he likes it enough to buy the rest of the episodes. If they don't like it, they're saving money they would have otherwise already spent.
If you're doing X11 forwarding, you can use NX. It is specifically designed for low-bandwidth high-latency links like dialup, and apparently works wonders.
From what I understand, it works by adding compression (probably a result of using SSH for transport), eliminates most X round-trips (this'd be the big timesaver), and uses extensive caching, resulting in far higher performance.
Simple solution: get a really cheap VPS, and proxy your traffic through a compressed stream. You can go the simple route and do an HTTP proxy over a compressed SSH tunnel, you can get more complex and do SOCKS over a compressed SSH tunnel, or you can go for some sort of Squid setup that gzips text content that goes through it (and possibly recompresses images at lower quality).
To do this, you can get a really cheap VPS ($10-$15/mth should do it), as you don't need much bandwidth/memory/CPU for such a simple proxy solution.
The downside of this is that you're increasing latency by relaying, although this can be mitigated depending on where the VPS is located.
There's always a solution if you're willing to put a bit of effort (and a bit of money) into it.
Incorrect. They typically support alternate-frame rendering (each card does every other frame) for games that are problematic, but the best performance is to be had with tile-based rendering. This is where the SLI setup splits the scene up into a number of tiles, and then the two cards render them all, splitting the load so that each card is working as hard as it can. This is effectively splitting on the pixel level, but in a bit larger chunks. I'm sure that's because whatever overhead is involved probably increases the smaller the tiles get.
Yes, it's out-of-box experience that we're comparing. To do an apples to apples comparison, if you buy a PC, it comes with Windows, OSX, Ubuntu, etc.
You plug it in, turn it on, insert a CD of MP3s. You double-click a file. On Windows, WMP pops up and plays it. On OSX, I assume iTunes pops up and plays it.
What happens on Ubuntu? Does it "just work"? Does it display a popup telling you how to get MP3s playing without doing it for you?
If double clicking a button in Ubuntu displays a dialog box, and hitting "OK" installs the packages and makes MP3s work, that's not so bad. Bonus points if the file you double-clicked plays after the installation. If it's any more complicated than that, it fails in that category when compared to the competition.
The license in question is for the software developer/manufacturer. There isn't any redistribution of licenses involved. The license also (as far as I can tell from official sources) covers all patents in all countries.
In other words, if Ubuntu pays for a license, there is no issue with where anybody lives. Ubuntu will have the right to distribute MP3 decoders to any country.
Synaptic is far, far too complicated for the average Luddite. Many people have trouble with the "keep clicking next" installers, because they find them confusing, let alone a package management system.
These complaints only apply in the "average super market PC buying home user", though. If it's not used in that marketspace, then it doesn't matter.
But because it IS being pushed there, and reviewed there, and compared there, you're entirely wrong; it's not an apples to oranges comparison.
The user buys a computer. It has Linux on it. Or it has Windows on it. Or it has OSX on it. They don't know the difference, they don't know where it came from, they probably don't know what open source is, they probably don't know how much the OS costs. They bought the PC and they expect it to do what they want.
It's all well and good to talk about free versus giant corporation, but when your average joe buys a PC, they don't know or care about any of that. This is what makes it a fair comparison. As long as they're being sold in the same manner to the same market, they must be compared by the same standards.
It isn't hard for you. But you're not an average user. My parents have enough trouble using a mouse, and you want them to install MP3 codecs? No, they need to double click a file and have it just work.
To use an analogy from another reply, not supporting MP3 out of the box these days is like not supporting a mouse out of the box. The average doesn't know what a mouse driver is, and they'd be annoyed and confused as to why it wasn't working out of the box. The same applies to MP3s. Most people don't know what a codec is, and they don't care. They just want their music to play.
And those computers don't have out-of-the-box MP3 support unless the distribution maker paid for an MP3 license. So far, to my knowledge, only Lindows does that.
The hardcore Linux proponents can deny it all they want, the simple fact of the matter is that when the average user sits down with a Linux box, there are still numerous shortcomings that may make it unacceptable.
I've said it elsewhere, I've said it here; licensing MP3 would be a good start for Ubuntu. They can certainly afford it, and the US MP3 patents are only valid until 2012, so it'd cost at most $250,000 to essentially get permanent MP3 support.
Maybe it's because their events are failing. At the recent FanExpo in Toronto, both the WCG and the WSVG had events. While the WSVG had ten times the budget of the WCG (and managed to steal most of the sponsors), it didn't end up nearly as popular as the WCG's event.
So, if the WCG can produce much better RoI on a significantly smaller budget, what does that say about the WSVG?
I can't speak for Redmond, but here in Montreal (where that shiny new Apple store will be), that's not the case.
Quebec, due to the success of our government-owned power company HydroQuebec, has its own interconnect. Texas does too, IIRC. HydroQuebec is the single largest producer of hydroelectricity in the entire world, and tends to produce much power power than we use. Quebec makes quite the pretty penny selling that excess power to other provinces and the US.
However, you can twist your logic a bit to make it still apply. Because Hydro sells their power to people with much dirtier sources (like the US), by reducing power usage HERE, there is more available to sell THERE. And if some place like the US then buys more power, they're using their own dirty sources less.
Of course, that's IF the extra capacity is sold. Does Hydro sell all excess power, or just as much as people are willing to buy? If excess power doesn't result in increased sales to outside grids, then reducing our power consumption doesn't really do anything for the environment.
OK, so Hydro-Quebec actually does have some non-hydro sources. Out of their 35.19 GW capacity, 2.145 GW are produced through other means (thermal, gas turbine, and nuclear). Still, 94% hydro isn't too bad, especially considering that a decent chunk of the non-hydro is that CANDU nuclear reactor.
That's not the point. The point is that BD aren't necessarily any more susceptible to damage than HD-DVD, removing that advantage.
Besides, maybe they do mandate a specific coating. When BluRay first moved out of the caddy, it was TDK's coating that was cited as to how it was possible. Sony may have required the use of TDK's technology for non-caddy BluRay discs. If that's the case, then they would be better off than uncoated HDDVD discs.
So, what we really need to know is what the required standard is.
There's an OSX port in the works (it's been reviewed online). If you can't wait unitil then, you can run uTorrent under WINE. Sure, you get some extra memory bloat, but the CPU and disk footprint should be the same (assuming you already have WINE installed).
Except that's not true. You can cover your initial development expenses with the monthly fee. Considering the cost of bandwidth in bulk, there's an enormous profit margin on MMO monthly fees. They don't use much bandwidth anyhow. Most of the rest can go to overhead (which should be relatively low) and development.
Take WoW for example. Now, I hate most MMOs in general, but their pricing scheme really rips off the consumer. Not only do you have to pay for the box (and I should point out that initial R&D was paid off LONG ago), but you end up paying something like $15/mth in subscription fees too. On top of this, you also need to buy the expansion packs, despite the fact that between the first game coming out and the expansion, people have probably spent hundreds of dollars on subscriptions!
The game has what, 8 million subscribers paying $15 million a month? 1.4 billion dollars per year, are you telling me that doesn't cover initial development, bandwidth, overhead, etc?
It's a flawed pricing model as far as the consumer is concerned, no way a company making 1.4 billion dollars per year needs to charge for "expansions" to products their customers are already paying for monthly.
Not true. GPL covers distribution, not what you can do with GPL'd software on your own computer. If you release the DLL and EXE separately, your users are perfectly allowed to put that DLL in the same directory as the EXE and use them together, they're not distributing them together.
Remember, we're talking about dynamically linking libraries. The linking happens at *runtime*, not compile time.
There is a simple solution. Say you take a GPL'd MP3 encoding library. You compile it as a DLL.
You then release a frontend for the library, a program that uses the library for the compression.
The GPL says that your frontend need NOT be GPL'd so long as you distribute them separately. So if, on your webpage, you have a link to the EXE ("Download program here") and the library ("Download required files here"), you ONLY need to provide GPL'd source for the library.
The GPL only requires you to GPL your own code when you distribute your code with GPL'd code as a "whole", and it specifically mentions the separation bit.
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What does Vivendi have to do with anything? They're not Valve's publisher anymore, EA is.
The Orange Box launches on October 5th in Europe.
It launches in North America on October 9th, and October 10th on Steam.
It looks like digital distribution hasn't changed a thing when it comes to arbitrary launch dates that have nothing to do with a products readiness.
You can buy just Episode 2, or at least you will once it's out. Steam lists the price as $30. That would seem to invalidate your main point.
Valve isn't a small company. They have multiple teams, and they work on different projects. TF2 was ready before Episode 2, and it would seem that Portal was finished quite some time ago. Episode 2 is what has been holding everything back, so it would seem that not having TF2/Portal probably wouldn't have sped up the release.
The episodes cost $20 each. There are three of them. Together they constitute what, ~18 hours of FPS gameplay? That's about the length of a full game. Three episodic games, $60 total. That's also about the cost of a full game.
So, all told, you're getting about the same amount of gameplay as a full game for about the same cost. How is that "milking more money out of consumers"?
Besides, Valve tends to also release episodes with other content bundled in. Episode two, for example, will also be available in a package called "The Orange Box", which includes (for $45) Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode 1, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. Even for me, who already owns the first two items in that list, $45 for Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal, that's a very good deal. I'd easily spend the $45 just on Team Fortress alone.
If anything, episodic content is the OPPOSITE of milking more money from consumers. In a similar way to the Shareware days of old, a gamer can purchase the first episode, and use that to decide if he likes it enough to buy the rest of the episodes. If they don't like it, they're saving money they would have otherwise already spent.
If you're doing X11 forwarding, you can use NX. It is specifically designed for low-bandwidth high-latency links like dialup, and apparently works wonders.
From what I understand, it works by adding compression (probably a result of using SSH for transport), eliminates most X round-trips (this'd be the big timesaver), and uses extensive caching, resulting in far higher performance.
Simple solution: get a really cheap VPS, and proxy your traffic through a compressed stream. You can go the simple route and do an HTTP proxy over a compressed SSH tunnel, you can get more complex and do SOCKS over a compressed SSH tunnel, or you can go for some sort of Squid setup that gzips text content that goes through it (and possibly recompresses images at lower quality).
To do this, you can get a really cheap VPS ($10-$15/mth should do it), as you don't need much bandwidth/memory/CPU for such a simple proxy solution.
The downside of this is that you're increasing latency by relaying, although this can be mitigated depending on where the VPS is located.
There's always a solution if you're willing to put a bit of effort (and a bit of money) into it.
Incorrect. They typically support alternate-frame rendering (each card does every other frame) for games that are problematic, but the best performance is to be had with tile-based rendering. This is where the SLI setup splits the scene up into a number of tiles, and then the two cards render them all, splitting the load so that each card is working as hard as it can. This is effectively splitting on the pixel level, but in a bit larger chunks. I'm sure that's because whatever overhead is involved probably increases the smaller the tiles get.
Yes, it's out-of-box experience that we're comparing. To do an apples to apples comparison, if you buy a PC, it comes with Windows, OSX, Ubuntu, etc.
You plug it in, turn it on, insert a CD of MP3s. You double-click a file. On Windows, WMP pops up and plays it. On OSX, I assume iTunes pops up and plays it.
What happens on Ubuntu? Does it "just work"? Does it display a popup telling you how to get MP3s playing without doing it for you?
If double clicking a button in Ubuntu displays a dialog box, and hitting "OK" installs the packages and makes MP3s work, that's not so bad. Bonus points if the file you double-clicked plays after the installation. If it's any more complicated than that, it fails in that category when compared to the competition.
The license in question is for the software developer/manufacturer. There isn't any redistribution of licenses involved. The license also (as far as I can tell from official sources) covers all patents in all countries.
In other words, if Ubuntu pays for a license, there is no issue with where anybody lives. Ubuntu will have the right to distribute MP3 decoders to any country.
I suggest you take a look at http://mp3licensing.com/help/developers.html
Synaptic is far, far too complicated for the average Luddite. Many people have trouble with the "keep clicking next" installers, because they find them confusing, let alone a package management system.
These complaints only apply in the "average super market PC buying home user", though. If it's not used in that marketspace, then it doesn't matter.
But because it IS being pushed there, and reviewed there, and compared there, you're entirely wrong; it's not an apples to oranges comparison.
The user buys a computer. It has Linux on it. Or it has Windows on it. Or it has OSX on it. They don't know the difference, they don't know where it came from, they probably don't know what open source is, they probably don't know how much the OS costs. They bought the PC and they expect it to do what they want.
It's all well and good to talk about free versus giant corporation, but when your average joe buys a PC, they don't know or care about any of that. This is what makes it a fair comparison. As long as they're being sold in the same manner to the same market, they must be compared by the same standards.
It isn't hard for you. But you're not an average user. My parents have enough trouble using a mouse, and you want them to install MP3 codecs? No, they need to double click a file and have it just work.
To use an analogy from another reply, not supporting MP3 out of the box these days is like not supporting a mouse out of the box. The average doesn't know what a mouse driver is, and they'd be annoyed and confused as to why it wasn't working out of the box. The same applies to MP3s. Most people don't know what a codec is, and they don't care. They just want their music to play.
And those computers don't have out-of-the-box MP3 support unless the distribution maker paid for an MP3 license. So far, to my knowledge, only Lindows does that.
The hardcore Linux proponents can deny it all they want, the simple fact of the matter is that when the average user sits down with a Linux box, there are still numerous shortcomings that may make it unacceptable.
I've said it elsewhere, I've said it here; licensing MP3 would be a good start for Ubuntu. They can certainly afford it, and the US MP3 patents are only valid until 2012, so it'd cost at most $250,000 to essentially get permanent MP3 support.
Maybe it's because their events are failing. At the recent FanExpo in Toronto, both the WCG and the WSVG had events. While the WSVG had ten times the budget of the WCG (and managed to steal most of the sponsors), it didn't end up nearly as popular as the WCG's event.
So, if the WCG can produce much better RoI on a significantly smaller budget, what does that say about the WSVG?
I can't speak for Redmond, but here in Montreal (where that shiny new Apple store will be), that's not the case.
Quebec, due to the success of our government-owned power company HydroQuebec, has its own interconnect. Texas does too, IIRC. HydroQuebec is the single largest producer of hydroelectricity in the entire world, and tends to produce much power power than we use. Quebec makes quite the pretty penny selling that excess power to other provinces and the US.
However, you can twist your logic a bit to make it still apply. Because Hydro sells their power to people with much dirtier sources (like the US), by reducing power usage HERE, there is more available to sell THERE. And if some place like the US then buys more power, they're using their own dirty sources less.
Of course, that's IF the extra capacity is sold. Does Hydro sell all excess power, or just as much as people are willing to buy? If excess power doesn't result in increased sales to outside grids, then reducing our power consumption doesn't really do anything for the environment.
OK, so Hydro-Quebec actually does have some non-hydro sources. Out of their 35.19 GW capacity, 2.145 GW are produced through other means (thermal, gas turbine, and nuclear). Still, 94% hydro isn't too bad, especially considering that a decent chunk of the non-hydro is that CANDU nuclear reactor.
THREE uncompressed (CD-quality) DRM-free songs for $6? That's about $2.00 per song, not much higher than Apple's DRM-free pricing.
In fact, since you're getting it uncompressed, I'm not seeing the problem here... Their pricing is in line with digital downloads.
I'm using their bits, eh? Well, they're using my CPU with all their annoying flash ads.
As soon as people learn that annoying (and often intrusive) Flash ads aren't appreciated, then there won't be a major reason for adblock.
That's not the point. The point is that BD aren't necessarily any more susceptible to damage than HD-DVD, removing that advantage.
Besides, maybe they do mandate a specific coating. When BluRay first moved out of the caddy, it was TDK's coating that was cited as to how it was possible. Sony may have required the use of TDK's technology for non-caddy BluRay discs. If that's the case, then they would be better off than uncoated HDDVD discs.
So, what we really need to know is what the required standard is.
There's an OSX port in the works (it's been reviewed online). If you can't wait unitil then, you can run uTorrent under WINE. Sure, you get some extra memory bloat, but the CPU and disk footprint should be the same (assuming you already have WINE installed).
Except that's not true. You can cover your initial development expenses with the monthly fee. Considering the cost of bandwidth in bulk, there's an enormous profit margin on MMO monthly fees. They don't use much bandwidth anyhow. Most of the rest can go to overhead (which should be relatively low) and development.
Take WoW for example. Now, I hate most MMOs in general, but their pricing scheme really rips off the consumer. Not only do you have to pay for the box (and I should point out that initial R&D was paid off LONG ago), but you end up paying something like $15/mth in subscription fees too. On top of this, you also need to buy the expansion packs, despite the fact that between the first game coming out and the expansion, people have probably spent hundreds of dollars on subscriptions!
The game has what, 8 million subscribers paying $15 million a month? 1.4 billion dollars per year, are you telling me that doesn't cover initial development, bandwidth, overhead, etc?
It's a flawed pricing model as far as the consumer is concerned, no way a company making 1.4 billion dollars per year needs to charge for "expansions" to products their customers are already paying for monthly.
As I was reading, I half expected the lawsuit to be "ALLIED TUBE & CONDUIT CORP. v. INTERNATIONAL BIG TRUCK INC."
Not true. GPL covers distribution, not what you can do with GPL'd software on your own computer. If you release the DLL and EXE separately, your users are perfectly allowed to put that DLL in the same directory as the EXE and use them together, they're not distributing them together.
Remember, we're talking about dynamically linking libraries. The linking happens at *runtime*, not compile time.
There is a simple solution. Say you take a GPL'd MP3 encoding library. You compile it as a DLL.
You then release a frontend for the library, a program that uses the library for the compression.
The GPL says that your frontend need NOT be GPL'd so long as you distribute them separately. So if, on your webpage, you have a link to the EXE ("Download program here") and the library ("Download required files here"), you ONLY need to provide GPL'd source for the library.
The GPL only requires you to GPL your own code when you distribute your code with GPL'd code as a "whole", and it specifically mentions the separation bit.