I'm pretty sure even Windows is smart enough to just use the BIOS-provided access, if it doesn't have a driver. If it does, provide it in a driver.
It would likely also require a different filesystem.
Nope. You can do exactly the same pretend-it's-a-hard-drive approach, until additional filesystems are developed. And there's nothing preventing a third party from developing a filesystem for Windows.
Again, see the BIOS approach. In fact, look at nVidia's fakeraid -- software RAID done with BIOS support and a Windows driver. This is neither a particularly new idea, nor a particularly difficult one, especially if you're preinstalling.
Hardware manufacturers are not going to wait for Microsoft to catch up
Indeed. But I don't want to wait for both Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers to catch up.
The problem with your approach is that the OS wont understand the drive as well as the manufacturer does, so it will always be a sub-optimal solution.
The problem is, we currently have a sub-optimal solution, for just that reason -- the manufacturers make assumptions, even regarding things like FAT size and location, when tuning the performance of these drives.
We're adding hack upon hack upon hack -- the OS will have some sort of defragmenter, and will attempt to avoid fragmentation, just as the device is deliberately scattering writes throughout the disk.
If we want to let the drive provide some sort of BIOS-like scheme -- wherein some code (appropriately sandboxed) is included in the drive, and executed by the CPU -- I'm all for that. But let's design it with an eye towards what this device actually needs to do, rather than making it pretend to be a hard drive.
That's my biggest complaint about them, actually -- these "teething problems" people mention are pretty much directly a result of OSes treating SSDs as though they were spinning magnetic disks.
No, the OS should be able to do its own wear leveling. If you need to pretend it's a hard drive, do it in the BIOS and/or the drivers, not in the silicon -- at least that way, you can upgrade it later when things like this come out.
The main problem here is, yes, people do learn by doing the exact same problems. Sometimes it's boring, like a quicksort; sometimes it's cool, like Ruby Koans, but at the very least, no one learns to program without learning Hello World.
Yes, at a certain point, it'd be cool to be doing new things, and sharing, and collaborating. But there is a reason the existing problems should be done, and sharing source code is pretty much like sharing an essay -- not good.
True... But several remote office's losing access is different than everyone everywhere losing access because of an Internet/power failure (or perhaps a google routing problem).
Not for a sufficiently large company. You're still talking about "everyone, everywhere" losing access except for your main datacenter.
If you have a datacenter with a few hundred or thousands of users on location, at least they can still access.
True. You've also still got a few hundred or thousands of users who can't.
Also - Outsourcing? Seriously? That's worked great for everyone involved in that...
I'm not talking about pushing everything off to India.
I'm talking about the fact that if you're Wal-Mart, you're Wal-Mart, not an IT company. You focus on what it is you actually do well, and you hire someone else to handle the rest.
Here's another question: Where do your cleaning staff come from? How about food, do you go out to eat, or is everything in-house? How about legal documents -- do you have your own crack team of lawyers who work for you and only you, or do you occasionally hire a law firm? (And where's your guarantee that they'll keep your important documents safe?) How about shipping -- do you send employees on foot, or do you just use FedEx, DHL, etc?
That's the point. Most businesses, especially SMBs, do not have to do everything -- indeed, cannot do everything. If they can avoid the cost of running their own servers, having their own IT staff, and essentially reduce the internal cost of IT to keeping a few web browsers running, that's a win.
If the concern is that too many people at Google have access to your data, or that Google loses data, those are separate concerns from the common kneejerk reaction to "oh noes it's not in-house!!" But your post was about "cloud computing" in general, not Google in particular.
And there's nothing particularly new or unwise about trusting a third party with your data -- you have to anyway. The important question is who to trust, what data, what's their SLA, does it buy you anything, etc.
Except at the "IE only" site point in history, you could still get IE for Macs, for free. No licence needed.
I wonder how much Apple had to pay Microsoft for that privilege? And I certainly couldn't do the same for Linux -- moreover, I couldn't download the Windows version and run it under Wine, at least not legally, without a Windows license.
The laws don't change based purely on how large a company is.
No, but they do change based on how successful a monopoly that company is.
Anti-competitive is anti-competitive.
It only becomes anti-trust when you are a certain size -- again, within a given market.
Including a new splash screen with choices at this late juncture just isn't going to happen,
A splash screen should take, what, fifteen minutes to code? Maybe an hour to design?
Yeah, I'm exaggerating, but really? I guess it's related to the rumored start menu team -- the team that met weekly for a year discussing, debating, and planning which options should go on the "shut down" portion of the Start Menu.
To be fair, chrome.com has nothing to do with the browser. Oh, and it's ftp.mozilla.org, not ftp.mozilla.com -- but I got that on the first try.
However, the other two do work, and I was able to navigate to a Windows download without requiring a web browser in each of the other two cases. It's pretty obvious if you know what you're looking for.
I wouldn't suggest this over simply borrowing a friend's computer, a library computer, an Apple Store computer, and downloading to a USB stick, or just letting the OEM install something. But it does work.
Apple doesn't have 90% of the personal computing market?
There are plenty of things that Apple does today that would be illegal if they were big enough. That's why these are antitrust laws -- in other words, anti-monopoly laws.
Removing the browser from the OS harms only the customer, who may actually want it, or in fact need it.
I assert that no one needs IE.
People may need the IE engine -- in which case, IETab will likely still work, as Trident will still be in Windows.
Or, finally, OEMs will just be installing it anyway, because Windows is supposed to come with IE, and some users know that.
Or OEMs will install whatever they want -- which may very well not be IE.
The users who "know" that are more than capable, as you pointed out, to download it from Windows Update -- but they are a minotiry. Yes, they will have to spend time downloading it -- just like the rest of us had to spend time downloading Firefox.
If you are selling a computer without an OS, you already have a highly sophisticated market. If you are building your own system, you're also clearly sophisticated enough.
That, or you have no special deal with MS, but you're at least willing to let the customer buy the OS through you, and pay you to install it.
In any case, you end up with the same situation: A person technically literate enough to install the OS should also be literate enough to download a browser on another computer, to a flash drive...
If you are technically literate enough to install an operating system, you are technically literate enough to borrow someone else's computer and download a browser to a USB stick.
It's hardly the most difficult problem you'll have installing Windows -- I've had to do precisely that when Windows didn't come with a driver for the network card in a given machine.
Nor is that the only solution, it's just the easiest for most people. Another solution: Boot a Linux livecd and download it there.
Forcing MS not to bundle a simple default browser with their OS isn't leveling the playing field, it's forcing them to play with a disadvantage over everyone else.
Microsoft owns over 80% of the market -- or is it still over 90%?
Certain things only become illegal once you are actually a monopoly.
How would you even GET to the Firefox website to install it if you didn't have IE included with a fresh Windows install
As a theoretical matter, there's always the Windows FTP client.
As a practical matter, most people don't keep install discs for their OSes, either. If they do, they keep install discs for printers, cameras, etc, despite that those mostly end up adding unneeded bloatware... not to mention antivirus, office suites, and other things considered essential.
So, I see no reason an OEM can't install a browser, or an end-user can't download one on another computer and transfer it over.
Slashdot is actually biased the wrong way, here -- to us, once a computer has a web browser, everything is possible, because we would rather download software, for free or otherwise. I'll download those printer drivers sooner than I'll pop in a disc. But the average end-user does none of these things -- they want everything set up for them, and whatever happens before that point is magic -- something their kid who's good with computers does, or something Dell does before they ship it.
What happens when your internet connection goes down?
Companies have dealt with this already -- for instance, often a central office will have the data, perhaps on an actual mainframe, but regardless -- branch offices connect in via VPN. No Internet, no VPN.
Better question: What happens when your power goes out? That seems to happen about as often as Internet being out -- more often, in fact, if you don't count the fact that Internet generally stops working when power does.
What happens when someone breaks in
And this is less likely in-house?
Quick question: Do you honestly believe you have a better IT department -- in particular, better security -- than Google? If so, you're either in a very small minority, or you're out of your fucking mind.
It's called outsourcing. It's not new.
The same goes for the "cloud" that google has consisting of googledocs. Why would any corporate entity (or home user?) want to rely upon internet based data storage for valuable documents?
Because it's convenient? Duh?
Oh, Google Docs can work offline, and MS Office can work online, which makes your whole argument moot. It makes me wonder if you're actually that uninformed, or if you're astroturfing.
The fact is, none of these are so much the creator's rights, as their ability to restrict yours. Put in that context, it suddenly becomes very clear whose rights are being violated.
When you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.
Since they are so late to the game at even thinking of providing legal downloads, and those downloads are still so amazingly technically inferior, they couldn't compete with piracy even if they were free, and they're not.
The sad thing is, it's trivially easy to compete with piracy, but so far, I don't see anyone besides Hulu even making a decent effort -- and even Hulu is questionable, as piracy is still a convenient way to break them out of that player and skip the ads.
Except that, according to relativity, falling is a state of rest, a result of the warping of space-time. Gravity is not a force, it's just the shape of space.
Thus, mass acceleration is what happens when you're standing on the ground, and the Earth is accelerating you upwards...
In any case, please explain how there is somehow less "mass acceleration" in orbit than in this plane. Again, the only difference is that the plane would eventually hit the ground if it didn't level off -- but that's a difference of direction; the phenomenon is precisely the same.
I didn't want to complicate the equation because anything with HDMI out probably has VGA out, and CRT SDTVs still outnumber TVs with an HDMI input.
Probably. I guess I've been a bit spoiled -- I have an HDMI-enabled monitor at home, and at least one friend with an HDMI-enabled TV. But then, I also have SVideo and VGA. Only thing I don't have is DVI.
That's a disadvantage in co-op.
Depends. I'd consider it an advantage in realism.
"Big"? It's bigger than it would be on a PC monitor. "High-res"? A 640x720p or 960x1080p picture has more pixels than the 640x480i picture from the previous console generation,
My monitor is 24 inches, 1080p. Most monitors I've seen are at least some 19 inches for a desktop, and at least 1280x1024, commonly 1600x1200. If we're doing a four-way split-screen, that implies the TV is at least 48 inches -- and I'm likely sitting quite a bit farther back from it (probably a couch), so it looks smaller to me.
some genres (e.g. action puzzle games, fighting games, or anything else well represented on Wii) don't need high resolution.
Doesn't mean they don't benefit from a high resolution. Yes, Doom was playable on, what, 320x280? But I still enjoy Half-Life 2 at 1920x1080.
In each case, you have to think about whether or not the marginal increase in resolution warrants buying $1,500 worth of extra computers, one for each of three people who happen to be visiting my house but are not bringing a PC.
That is still making a pretty bold assumption -- that anyone would even consider that, rather than merely suggesting they bring their PC.
And yes, they very likely will have a PC.
On the other hand, $1500 -- a reasonable total, not a price per computer -- doesn't look bad compared to a new 60" TV. Of course, choosing that 60" TV has the advantage that it's usable for sitting back and watching a movie, and I'll give you that -- on the other hand, having four separate PCs, each hooked up to decent Internet, means people can watch different things.
In that case, publishers exist to generate links.
I don't think that's the whole story.
In Steam's case, for example, they provide links, and dev tools (including an engine), and a distribution platform, etc. Also, "publisher" often implies "investor" -- the company that will write you a check to develop a game (when you have no money at all), and then help you sell it.
Aggregators like Slashdot are more likely to find and link to an article if it's published on a venue that a lot of people read, such as NYTimes.com, than if it's published on someone's blog.
Perhaps, but I seem to see at least as many links to random people's blogs as I do to nytimes.com on Slashdot these days.
The Internet means you don't have to be one of the big boys to play.
I'd still rather play a split screen than have to lug two or more computers into the same room.
Solution: Laptops. "Lug" is a strong word...
For that matter, they build relatively small desktop cases with carrying handles.
Also, many console multiplayer games offer LAN options if you really want separate systems and TVs.
Maybe. But you mostly don't see that -- partly because lugging a nice HDTV and console is a lot harder than "lugging" a laptop.
Either way, I'd definitely rather see a bit more convergence there. There's no good reason I shouldn't be able to hook a laptop up to a TV and play a local multiplayer game -- there really isn't much a console can do that my laptop can't do better. It's all about what kind of games are developed for what platform.
Granted, that's partly because you're trapped in one area until level 50 (at which point you have to start paying), and that area is hard to get to after level 50. Generally, people who would just shout out advertisements aren't willing to spend $10 for the very short opportunity until they get jailed.
But I would guess that is a problem -- if it's a pay game, there's a hurdle for griefers and spambots. If it's free, you have to play with CAPTCHAS and the like, just like any other free service.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say, disabling journaling is a bad idea. You want a wandering log, or just a log-based filesystem, or soft updates.
You don't want to go back to the days of having to fsck after crashes.
Not true at all -- that's why I mentioned a BIOS.
I'm pretty sure even Windows is smart enough to just use the BIOS-provided access, if it doesn't have a driver. If it does, provide it in a driver.
It would likely also require a different filesystem.
Nope. You can do exactly the same pretend-it's-a-hard-drive approach, until additional filesystems are developed. And there's nothing preventing a third party from developing a filesystem for Windows.
Again, see the BIOS approach. In fact, look at nVidia's fakeraid -- software RAID done with BIOS support and a Windows driver. This is neither a particularly new idea, nor a particularly difficult one, especially if you're preinstalling.
Hardware manufacturers are not going to wait for Microsoft to catch up
Indeed. But I don't want to wait for both Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers to catch up.
The problem with your approach is that the OS wont understand the drive as well as the manufacturer does, so it will always be a sub-optimal solution.
The problem is, we currently have a sub-optimal solution, for just that reason -- the manufacturers make assumptions, even regarding things like FAT size and location, when tuning the performance of these drives.
We're adding hack upon hack upon hack -- the OS will have some sort of defragmenter, and will attempt to avoid fragmentation, just as the device is deliberately scattering writes throughout the disk.
If we want to let the drive provide some sort of BIOS-like scheme -- wherein some code (appropriately sandboxed) is included in the drive, and executed by the CPU -- I'm all for that. But let's design it with an eye towards what this device actually needs to do, rather than making it pretend to be a hard drive.
That's my biggest complaint about them, actually -- these "teething problems" people mention are pretty much directly a result of OSes treating SSDs as though they were spinning magnetic disks.
No, the OS should be able to do its own wear leveling. If you need to pretend it's a hard drive, do it in the BIOS and/or the drivers, not in the silicon -- at least that way, you can upgrade it later when things like this come out.
The main problem here is, yes, people do learn by doing the exact same problems. Sometimes it's boring, like a quicksort; sometimes it's cool, like Ruby Koans, but at the very least, no one learns to program without learning Hello World.
Yes, at a certain point, it'd be cool to be doing new things, and sharing, and collaborating. But there is a reason the existing problems should be done, and sharing source code is pretty much like sharing an essay -- not good.
True... But several remote office's losing access is different than everyone everywhere losing access because of an Internet/power failure (or perhaps a google routing problem).
Not for a sufficiently large company. You're still talking about "everyone, everywhere" losing access except for your main datacenter.
If you have a datacenter with a few hundred or thousands of users on location, at least they can still access.
True. You've also still got a few hundred or thousands of users who can't.
Also - Outsourcing? Seriously? That's worked great for everyone involved in that...
I'm not talking about pushing everything off to India.
I'm talking about the fact that if you're Wal-Mart, you're Wal-Mart, not an IT company. You focus on what it is you actually do well, and you hire someone else to handle the rest.
Here's another question: Where do your cleaning staff come from? How about food, do you go out to eat, or is everything in-house? How about legal documents -- do you have your own crack team of lawyers who work for you and only you, or do you occasionally hire a law firm? (And where's your guarantee that they'll keep your important documents safe?) How about shipping -- do you send employees on foot, or do you just use FedEx, DHL, etc?
That's the point. Most businesses, especially SMBs, do not have to do everything -- indeed, cannot do everything. If they can avoid the cost of running their own servers, having their own IT staff, and essentially reduce the internal cost of IT to keeping a few web browsers running, that's a win.
If the concern is that too many people at Google have access to your data, or that Google loses data, those are separate concerns from the common kneejerk reaction to "oh noes it's not in-house!!" But your post was about "cloud computing" in general, not Google in particular.
And there's nothing particularly new or unwise about trusting a third party with your data -- you have to anyway. The important question is who to trust, what data, what's their SLA, does it buy you anything, etc.
Except at the "IE only" site point in history, you could still get IE for Macs, for free. No licence needed.
I wonder how much Apple had to pay Microsoft for that privilege? And I certainly couldn't do the same for Linux -- moreover, I couldn't download the Windows version and run it under Wine, at least not legally, without a Windows license.
The laws don't change based purely on how large a company is.
No, but they do change based on how successful a monopoly that company is.
Anti-competitive is anti-competitive.
It only becomes anti-trust when you are a certain size -- again, within a given market.
Including a new splash screen with choices at this late juncture just isn't going to happen,
A splash screen should take, what, fifteen minutes to code? Maybe an hour to design?
Yeah, I'm exaggerating, but really? I guess it's related to the rumored start menu team -- the team that met weekly for a year discussing, debating, and planning which options should go on the "shut down" portion of the Start Menu.
To be fair, chrome.com has nothing to do with the browser. Oh, and it's ftp.mozilla.org, not ftp.mozilla.com -- but I got that on the first try.
However, the other two do work, and I was able to navigate to a Windows download without requiring a web browser in each of the other two cases. It's pretty obvious if you know what you're looking for.
I wouldn't suggest this over simply borrowing a friend's computer, a library computer, an Apple Store computer, and downloading to a USB stick, or just letting the OEM install something. But it does work.
Hmm. I would probably complain, but hey, I'm not your target market:
WinAMP
Why not Songbird?
Calc98
Meh.
Notepad++
Double-meh. If you're literate enough to be using a text editor, you probably have a favorite already.
XP-AntiSpy, XP-AntiDAU
Probably good for them, but better to teach them how to not get spyware in the first place.
a good pre-learned Firewall
Something wrong with the built-in XP firewall?
antivirus, spyware-scanner
Same as the anti-spyware. In fact, I don't really see why these are separate products.
a custom theme (that they really love)
I can see that working. But, well, meh.
Oh, and all updates and patches.
Excellent.
Plus a small VNC tool that lets them request my assistance, when they call me (for money).
RDP would be better (more efficient, and there's still good Linux clients), but excellent.
Plus an install-cd (or image) with all this slipstreamed onto. (Which I also use to install it for them, so I can keep prices down.
Ideally, you'd also slipstream drivers specific to that machine -- unless you build identical machines for all of them.
Sorry, I know it's offtopic -- but on the other hand, I'm starting to think I should do this.
How is it any different?
Apple doesn't have 90% of the personal computing market?
There are plenty of things that Apple does today that would be illegal if they were big enough. That's why these are antitrust laws -- in other words, anti-monopoly laws.
Removing the browser from the OS harms only the customer, who may actually want it, or in fact need it.
I assert that no one needs IE.
People may need the IE engine -- in which case, IETab will likely still work, as Trident will still be in Windows.
Or, finally, OEMs will just be installing it anyway, because Windows is supposed to come with IE, and some users know that.
Or OEMs will install whatever they want -- which may very well not be IE.
The users who "know" that are more than capable, as you pointed out, to download it from Windows Update -- but they are a minotiry. Yes, they will have to spend time downloading it -- just like the rest of us had to spend time downloading Firefox.
If you are selling a computer without an OS, you already have a highly sophisticated market. If you are building your own system, you're also clearly sophisticated enough.
That, or you have no special deal with MS, but you're at least willing to let the customer buy the OS through you, and pay you to install it.
In any case, you end up with the same situation: A person technically literate enough to install the OS should also be literate enough to download a browser on another computer, to a flash drive...
If you are technically literate enough to install an operating system, you are technically literate enough to borrow someone else's computer and download a browser to a USB stick.
It's hardly the most difficult problem you'll have installing Windows -- I've had to do precisely that when Windows didn't come with a driver for the network card in a given machine.
Nor is that the only solution, it's just the easiest for most people. Another solution: Boot a Linux livecd and download it there.
Forcing MS not to bundle a simple default browser with their OS isn't leveling the playing field, it's forcing them to play with a disadvantage over everyone else.
Microsoft owns over 80% of the market -- or is it still over 90%?
Certain things only become illegal once you are actually a monopoly.
How would you even GET to the Firefox website to install it if you didn't have IE included with a fresh Windows install
As a theoretical matter, there's always the Windows FTP client.
As a practical matter, most people don't keep install discs for their OSes, either. If they do, they keep install discs for printers, cameras, etc, despite that those mostly end up adding unneeded bloatware... not to mention antivirus, office suites, and other things considered essential.
So, I see no reason an OEM can't install a browser, or an end-user can't download one on another computer and transfer it over.
Slashdot is actually biased the wrong way, here -- to us, once a computer has a web browser, everything is possible, because we would rather download software, for free or otherwise. I'll download those printer drivers sooner than I'll pop in a disc. But the average end-user does none of these things -- they want everything set up for them, and whatever happens before that point is magic -- something their kid who's good with computers does, or something Dell does before they ship it.
What happens when your internet connection goes down?
Companies have dealt with this already -- for instance, often a central office will have the data, perhaps on an actual mainframe, but regardless -- branch offices connect in via VPN. No Internet, no VPN.
Better question: What happens when your power goes out? That seems to happen about as often as Internet being out -- more often, in fact, if you don't count the fact that Internet generally stops working when power does.
What happens when someone breaks in
And this is less likely in-house?
Quick question: Do you honestly believe you have a better IT department -- in particular, better security -- than Google? If so, you're either in a very small minority, or you're out of your fucking mind.
It's called outsourcing. It's not new.
The same goes for the "cloud" that google has consisting of googledocs. Why would any corporate entity (or home user?) want to rely upon internet based data storage for valuable documents?
Because it's convenient? Duh?
Oh, Google Docs can work offline, and MS Office can work online, which makes your whole argument moot. It makes me wonder if you're actually that uninformed, or if you're astroturfing.
...and that meteorite is the best he can do?
I would've expected a press conference, at least...
Well, it's not even that...
The fact is, none of these are so much the creator's rights, as their ability to restrict yours. Put in that context, it suddenly becomes very clear whose rights are being violated.
And that's the problem.
When you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.
Since they are so late to the game at even thinking of providing legal downloads, and those downloads are still so amazingly technically inferior, they couldn't compete with piracy even if they were free, and they're not.
The sad thing is, it's trivially easy to compete with piracy, but so far, I don't see anyone besides Hulu even making a decent effort -- and even Hulu is questionable, as piracy is still a convenient way to break them out of that player and skip the ads.
I'm only making an educated guess, but it seems to me that the drivers for the actual device don't change much.
For example: the same USB HID drivers work on 1 or 2. The very same network driver works on my internal ethernet port and my ExpressCard.
Kind of like how WoW doesn't care if you're on wired or wireless, any decent driver should be high-level enough not to care if you're on USB 2 or 3.
I beg to differ because I babysit. Kids usually can't bring their parents' PC.
Ah, fair enough. I generally play with at least teenagers, who tend to have their own.
While the speakers interfere.
Headphones.
Zero gravity means no mass acceleration.
Except that, according to relativity, falling is a state of rest, a result of the warping of space-time. Gravity is not a force, it's just the shape of space.
Thus, mass acceleration is what happens when you're standing on the ground, and the Earth is accelerating you upwards...
In any case, please explain how there is somehow less "mass acceleration" in orbit than in this plane. Again, the only difference is that the plane would eventually hit the ground if it didn't level off -- but that's a difference of direction; the phenomenon is precisely the same.
I didn't want to complicate the equation because anything with HDMI out probably has VGA out, and CRT SDTVs still outnumber TVs with an HDMI input.
Probably. I guess I've been a bit spoiled -- I have an HDMI-enabled monitor at home, and at least one friend with an HDMI-enabled TV. But then, I also have SVideo and VGA. Only thing I don't have is DVI.
That's a disadvantage in co-op.
Depends. I'd consider it an advantage in realism.
"Big"? It's bigger than it would be on a PC monitor. "High-res"? A 640x720p or 960x1080p picture has more pixels than the 640x480i picture from the previous console generation,
My monitor is 24 inches, 1080p. Most monitors I've seen are at least some 19 inches for a desktop, and at least 1280x1024, commonly 1600x1200. If we're doing a four-way split-screen, that implies the TV is at least 48 inches -- and I'm likely sitting quite a bit farther back from it (probably a couch), so it looks smaller to me.
some genres (e.g. action puzzle games, fighting games, or anything else well represented on Wii) don't need high resolution.
Doesn't mean they don't benefit from a high resolution. Yes, Doom was playable on, what, 320x280? But I still enjoy Half-Life 2 at 1920x1080.
In each case, you have to think about whether or not the marginal increase in resolution warrants buying $1,500 worth of extra computers, one for each of three people who happen to be visiting my house but are not bringing a PC.
That is still making a pretty bold assumption -- that anyone would even consider that, rather than merely suggesting they bring their PC.
And yes, they very likely will have a PC.
On the other hand, $1500 -- a reasonable total, not a price per computer -- doesn't look bad compared to a new 60" TV. Of course, choosing that 60" TV has the advantage that it's usable for sitting back and watching a movie, and I'll give you that -- on the other hand, having four separate PCs, each hooked up to decent Internet, means people can watch different things.
In that case, publishers exist to generate links.
I don't think that's the whole story.
In Steam's case, for example, they provide links, and dev tools (including an engine), and a distribution platform, etc. Also, "publisher" often implies "investor" -- the company that will write you a check to develop a game (when you have no money at all), and then help you sell it.
Aggregators like Slashdot are more likely to find and link to an article if it's published on a venue that a lot of people read, such as NYTimes.com, than if it's published on someone's blog.
Perhaps, but I seem to see at least as many links to random people's blogs as I do to nytimes.com on Slashdot these days.
The Internet means you don't have to be one of the big boys to play.
I'd still rather play a split screen than have to lug two or more computers into the same room.
Solution: Laptops. "Lug" is a strong word...
For that matter, they build relatively small desktop cases with carrying handles.
Also, many console multiplayer games offer LAN options if you really want separate systems and TVs.
Maybe. But you mostly don't see that -- partly because lugging a nice HDTV and console is a lot harder than "lugging" a laptop.
Either way, I'd definitely rather see a bit more convergence there. There's no good reason I shouldn't be able to hook a laptop up to a TV and play a local multiplayer game -- there really isn't much a console can do that my laptop can't do better. It's all about what kind of games are developed for what platform.
I have.
Granted, that's partly because you're trapped in one area until level 50 (at which point you have to start paying), and that area is hard to get to after level 50. Generally, people who would just shout out advertisements aren't willing to spend $10 for the very short opportunity until they get jailed.
But I would guess that is a problem -- if it's a pay game, there's a hurdle for griefers and spambots. If it's free, you have to play with CAPTCHAS and the like, just like any other free service.
Possible, but RTFA -- the fact that it gets redirected to an Earthlink page suggests that either the NAT itself is shady, or Comcast is.