Honestly, I have long resented Toshiba for refusing to cooperate with SONY / Phillips on merging the two standards. If you spend any time thinking about the two disc formats, it's clear which one has the most potential. On the one hand we have an intermediate, quick fix solution with just enough capacity to store High Definition mpeg4 video; on the other, a revolutionary disc format that does for optical storage what DVDs were to CDs. When the industry finally decides to adopt Blu-Ray as the standard, we'll begin to see prices for players, burners, media and (hopefully) movies drop. Eventually we'll see PC / console games (non-PS3) that take 3+ DVDs shipping on single discs, or game developers offering higher resolution content because the storage medium has surplus capacity.
I had a RoadRunner Business Class connection for a number of months. They gave me the cable equivelant of a dedicated line (a dedicated segment of their 1 GHz drop), and 6 Mbit/s down and 2 Mbit/s up for $300 a month. What's more, even before I had their business class connection, whenever I had a problem with connectivity, I could call up the local office and within 30 minutes to an hour, they'd have someone out fixing the line. When I upgraded to business class, they gave me a number I could call 24/7; I never needed to, but it was nice to know they offered it. Their service was good whether I had a residential connection or a business class; I only upgraded to business class because I needed the extra upstream bandwidth for work.
I was honestly surprised that a T1 still cost more than the business class connection, which was significantly faster -- seems as much as people complain about the cost of cable (TV), they're very reasonable when it comes to commercial internet connections. At any rate, if you'd asked me 12 years ago, I'd have agreed with author, that the tech savy would have access to inexpensive fiber or T1/ISDN lines by now. Granted, newer, better solutions have come along for the average consumer, but it still perplexes me why T1 and particularly ISDN lines are not only still leased, but why they still come with such a hefty premium.
I am a big fan of the Elder Scrolls series as well. I have a computer that is more than powerful enough to run Oblivion with most of the bells and whistles turned on, but I bought the XBOX 360 version because I wanted to play it on my beautiful SONY HDTV from my bed. I do not care about user created modules because the public modules for Morrowind all sucked; perhaps that changed at some point, but I stopped paying attention to user modules rather quickly. I think that Bethesda ought to offer a system to copy modules onto a USB storage device from the computer and transfer them onto the XBOX 360; Microsoft would probably have a tizzy though, since this would essentially penetrate their XBOX Live Marketplace only distribution system.
I beg to differ. It only took me ~140 hours to get all 1000 points on XBOX Live and a fame rating of 160 on my primary character. Granted, I used three different characters for the different factions. It is true that Oblivion is much larger and more open-ended than most (if not all) CRPGS, but I still think Oblivion could have used some more polish. In Morrowind, in addition to the normal mages and fighters guilds, there was a temple faction and 4 or 5 house factions that kept me busy for well over 400 hours.
I know I have not, and never will, finished every quest in Oblivion, but I got to the point where it takes at least an hour of searching to find more quests. I *really* miss the glossary in Morrowind's journal, it made the story much more immersive; the new quest system in the journal is great, but I would have liked to see the glossary continue. I miss trapped chests, flying potions and spells, ships and striders and teleport/recall spells too, but overall I am happy with Oblivion. I'll keep busy by reading the in-game books until an expansion is released;)
I am not particularly fond of paying for modules either though. I figured content downloads on the XBOX Live Marketplace would cost money (as that's pretty much the norm for games on XBOX Live! -- sadly, you pay more for an XBOX 360 version of a game only to have to shell out more cash when patches or trivial content additions are relased). I was surprised to hear that PC users also had to pay for the content updates. I think Microsoft has corrupted Bethesda; I would not even pay $0.10 for the horse armor packs, because horses are a vanity feature. All of my characters can run faster than even the most expensive horse, they're fun to steal though.
You sir are on crack. SONY still has a large line of consumer electronics that put differentiate them from their competition. SONY's one of the few companies with 1080p displays on the market at the moment, they're also the only company with a 400-disc DVD/SA-CD changer. SONY's no longer the dominant force they once were, but they are by no means a company with "no products."
It's not surprising that consumers trust SONY more than most consumer electronics companies. They (used to) have one the best track records for inovation, while at the same time, were one of the best-known manufacturers of proprietary technology. Features such as Control S (cables connecting SONY components that would extend the capabilities of IR control), and MemoryStick are present on just about any recent mid- to high-level SONY equipment these days, while competitors chose to ignore the concept or adopt a technology that is not owned by SONY (such as SD or Compact Flash). It does not phase me that SONY's the only major backer of MemoryStick technology; I own all SONY TVs and cameras, so the media's universal in my household. With SONY you're guaranteed (almost stubbornly) that SONY device A will work well with SONY device B right out of the box. Personally, my loyalty to SONY lies in the phenomenal quality of their high-end Trinitron CRT displays; which, unfortunately, are being phased out in both the professional computer display and consumer electronic markets. They have their faults, particularly the recent lack-luster array of features in newer devices when compared to competitors, but I do not mind paying the SONY premium, especially considering the quality of warranty service SONY offers for its high-end equipment.
SONY does manufacture some pretty crappy things, such as their universal remote controls and car audio equipment. But for the most part, the markets they are not a total joke in, they have pretty strong loyalty.
My PDA cost $600... granted it has the clearest 4" LCD money can buy. What kind of crappy display is this Origami thing going to have for $600-$1,000? I own a laptop and a PDA, I would prefer to keep the two devices separate - I would rather not have one device that sucks as a PDA and sucks as a laptop but has the novelty of being both.
Any idiot with a disassembler can locate a CPUID instruction with minimal effort... I have written many NOCD patches myself in the past and it often takes 30 minutes to an hour to find the conditional jump(s) that branch the execution when a CD is not present. Unless Skype checks the checksum of the binary, this is hardly news worthy.
I tend to think on the contrary... consoles are converging with the PC platform rather than diverging. With standard USB ports, support for PC input devices, built-in network connectivity, hard drive storage, the ancient shift from cartridges to CDs and DVDs, VGA output, and a whole host of other features, consoles are looking more and more like inexpensive general purpose computers (again).
That said, the two platforms do have advantages, but a lot of them creep their way into the other; such as gamepads for PC games and keyboard/mouse support on consoles.
What exactly is this hurdle Blizzard speaks of?
on
No WoW for the 360
·
· Score: 1
In the past it might have been reasonable to dismiss the idea of PC/Console interaction, but as SquareEnix has shown interoperability is not as hard as it sounds. The PS2 and XBOX 360 both have two standard USB ports on the front and support keyboards and mice, so the argument of user input is not as strong as it used to be. Granted, fonts need to be bigger so that text is legible on piss poor standard definition televisions, but WOW's existing interface is already well suited. Blizzard already uses a braindead "patcher", which would lend itself well to the XBOX Live Marketplace model for content updates; on an unrelated note, much of their customer base is equally braindead -- which is why I only played the game for a couple of months. Do not get me wrong, I could not care less about WOW... on any platform, but I do not think an XBOX 360 port would necessarily compromise the "WOW experience." The majority of Blizzard's customer base -- 12-year-old fanboys -- will be equally annoying no matter what platform they play on.
What ever happened to high res laptop displays?
on
MacBook Pro Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I own a 4 year old Toshiba laptop with a 15" LCD that has a native resolution of 1600x1200. Newer laptops come with even larger displays and 16:9/16:10 displays are a fad right now. These displays, despite their significant advantage with horizontal screen realestate, have fewer lines of horizontal resolution. I have considered buying a new laptop a couple of times now, but I am always discouraged by the giant leap backward in resolution. I cannot justify paying $2,000+ for a laptop that runs at a lower resolution than the one I have now... when you get used to high DPI displays (1600x1200 @ 15" or 2048x1536 @ 21") it is actually painful/annoying to look at large, low resolution displays.
Indeed, that is one of the reasons IBM is so proud of their new Cell architecture. It was designed to reduce the latency between CPU and RAM, perhaps more out of necessity than by choice. IBM wanted to reduce the complexity of the processor by moving a lot of the out-of-order-execution, register renaming, branch prediction, etc... logic off the silicon and into the compiler. Transmetta tried the same thing in the past, but found it only compounded memory latency issues. It works out for the Cell architecture, however, since it is designed around parallelism -- with a lot of the complexity dumped on the compiler, there is a lot more room on the die for more SPFs, cache and other logic. It should be interesting to see if the theory actually works beyond paper... it sounds like playing musical chairs with bottlenecks and praying compiler developers will do the really hard work.;)
Apparently, Acclaim does not quite grasp the concept that you need to charge money for your products if you do not want to hemerage money. Of course, that only works if the products you publish are worth paying money for.
Oh and let us not forget the brainfsck when these teachers were told to "right click," or press "ALT" to perform some task... That gave me a chuckle the first time I heard a teacher get confused by either of those two things;)
Teachers, at least when I was in grade school, were too busy and in some cases dare I say stupid, to learn how to use new programs and operating systems. I remember the hell incured in my Senior year when my high school switched from ancient Apple hardware to bleeding edge Pentium 3 DELL machines with Windows 98. The attendance system worked maybe 2 out of 3 days in the week, teachers spent half their time figuring out how to use their grade books and students were constantly fscking the machines up, because the school did not have a decent PC system administrator. Granted, any two-bit hack could use the Windows XP policy editor to restrict priviliges, but this was Windows 98 we were talking about, and a school that had always used Macintosh systems.
Given quality applications for attendance, grading and E-Mail I do not think the platform matters too much. But switching to a new platform without thoroughly educating the teachers beforehand is a recipie for disaster. School children will learn whatever system you put in front of them, so they are not so much the issue.
Nintendo Power... controllers (not the magazine) were not exactly what you would call a success. When was the last time you saw someone using a Power Glove... 1989? Nintendo and SEGA both had stupid pads on the floor with IR sensors that added little to games that used them. Gamers are fatter than ever, if the idea did not go over well in the late to early 90s what makes anyone think it is going to go over well now?:)
The Intel C++ compiler and VTune are handy tools for writing parallelized x86 code. However, until recently such code was only practical for server code, as HyperThreading was the best a typical desktop machine could do running multiple threads. Except for the legacy CPU particle engine I worked on, I never really put much effort into optimizing this way and I know most other game programmers were the same. Time spent tuning code for a CPU architecture that your target hardware spec. does not have does not make a lot of sense.
I am sure that just as programmable GPUs changed the way 3D engines are designed, multi-core CPUs and the Cell architecture will see a lot of coverage in future GDCs. If you teach new developers to think in terms of parallelization from day one, they probably will not be as overwhelmed by Cell as us dinosaurs are.
This is an educated guess at best, but would not programmers in teir IV tend to write code that stands little to nothing to gain by Cell's parallell architecture? I mean, engine programmers would be in tier I - III, the menial tasks would be tier IV. I do not see controller polling and other boring game logic benefiting greatly by using more than one SPE. Matrix and vector math, on the other hand, have potential - but a good optimizing compiler can optimize that stuff without a lot of hints.
If this compiler is truly intended to make unoptimized tier IV code Cell friendly, it had better do an extremely good job simplifying branches -- since the SPEs are highly pipelined and branching can stall for up to 18 cycles. A lot of highlevel programmers never think about the consequences of branch misprediction even though they write some of the most branch-heavy code. Compiler optimization feedback is nice, but I do not think tier IV programmers look for or even know what to do with it.
The features you describe are part of the XBOX 360 dashboard, the other crap I was refering to has to do with the XBOX Live server infrastructure. Rankings, leaderboards, matchmaking, etc... none of it is relevant for a cross-platform MMOG. And if the XBOX Live Marketplace is used for updates, a player will have to download each update individually, kind of like the stupid WOW updater that makes you download 5 separate updates to go from version X.3 to X.8. The XBOX Live infrastructure is great for games that do not have dedicated servers (XBOX Live matches dynamically create server instances) and do not have frequent content updates and patches, but it clearly was not designed with MMOGs in mind - which was the point of this article.
DSLOA was a disappointingly short game that was touted an expansion pack, but did not require the original title to play. The difference of course, is that DSLOA provided a copy of the original game to distract newcomers (including the original singleplayer campaign); HL2: Episode 1 is apparently a 4-6 hour singleplayer game with DeathMatch, but not the original HL2 singleplayer content. The article says this expansion will be $20, which still seems high for a game that is only projected to take 4-6 hours... Valve must be banking on DeathMatch.
Microsoft has had a nasty habit in the original XBOX Live service of charging its customers no less than $5.00 for the most trivial of content updates. Though to be honest, I don't know why an MMORPG would want to use the XBOX Live infrastructure when they already have their own proprietary infrastructure. Short of letting others know a GamerTag has their 360 turned on and logged into XBOX 360, the rest of the XBOX Live crap is just a nusiance to developers and subscribers. I'd be really frustrated if everytime I started Generic MMORPG X on my 360 I had to login to XBOX Live, select an in-game menu "check for updates," which like all other XBOX Live titles boots you out of the game into the XBOX Live Marketplace, where you have to restart the game countless more times before you can actually play it.
I have read on more than one occasion where a person fancies the idea of cosmic radiation causing extinctions on Earth. It seems to me, however, that if it had happened in the past it would have sterilized even the most resilient life on Earth; not the simple extinction of a mere handful of species. Furthermore, in addition to the Earth's magnetosphere, the Sun's - which extends over 10 billion miles (further than either of the Voyager spacecraft have traveled) - shields us from a great deal of foreign radiation.
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Honestly, I have long resented Toshiba for refusing to cooperate with SONY / Phillips on merging the two standards. If you spend any time thinking about the two disc formats, it's clear which one has the most potential. On the one hand we have an intermediate, quick fix solution with just enough capacity to store High Definition mpeg4 video; on the other, a revolutionary disc format that does for optical storage what DVDs were to CDs. When the industry finally decides to adopt Blu-Ray as the standard, we'll begin to see prices for players, burners, media and (hopefully) movies drop. Eventually we'll see PC / console games (non-PS3) that take 3+ DVDs shipping on single discs, or game developers offering higher resolution content because the storage medium has surplus capacity.
I had a RoadRunner Business Class connection for a number of months. They gave me the cable equivelant of a dedicated line (a dedicated segment of their 1 GHz drop), and 6 Mbit/s down and 2 Mbit/s up for $300 a month. What's more, even before I had their business class connection, whenever I had a problem with connectivity, I could call up the local office and within 30 minutes to an hour, they'd have someone out fixing the line. When I upgraded to business class, they gave me a number I could call 24/7; I never needed to, but it was nice to know they offered it. Their service was good whether I had a residential connection or a business class; I only upgraded to business class because I needed the extra upstream bandwidth for work.
I was honestly surprised that a T1 still cost more than the business class connection, which was significantly faster -- seems as much as people complain about the cost of cable (TV), they're very reasonable when it comes to commercial internet connections. At any rate, if you'd asked me 12 years ago, I'd have agreed with author, that the tech savy would have access to inexpensive fiber or T1/ISDN lines by now. Granted, newer, better solutions have come along for the average consumer, but it still perplexes me why T1 and particularly ISDN lines are not only still leased, but why they still come with such a hefty premium.
Heaven forbid we should actually attack the cause of the problem and not merely the negative consequences. The simplest solution's usually the best.
I am a big fan of the Elder Scrolls series as well. I have a computer that is more than powerful enough to run Oblivion with most of the bells and whistles turned on, but I bought the XBOX 360 version because I wanted to play it on my beautiful SONY HDTV from my bed. I do not care about user created modules because the public modules for Morrowind all sucked; perhaps that changed at some point, but I stopped paying attention to user modules rather quickly. I think that Bethesda ought to offer a system to copy modules onto a USB storage device from the computer and transfer them onto the XBOX 360; Microsoft would probably have a tizzy though, since this would essentially penetrate their XBOX Live Marketplace only distribution system.
I beg to differ. It only took me ~140 hours to get all 1000 points on XBOX Live and a fame rating of 160 on my primary character. Granted, I used three different characters for the different factions. It is true that Oblivion is much larger and more open-ended than most (if not all) CRPGS, but I still think Oblivion could have used some more polish. In Morrowind, in addition to the normal mages and fighters guilds, there was a temple faction and 4 or 5 house factions that kept me busy for well over 400 hours.
;)
I know I have not, and never will, finished every quest in Oblivion, but I got to the point where it takes at least an hour of searching to find more quests. I *really* miss the glossary in Morrowind's journal, it made the story much more immersive; the new quest system in the journal is great, but I would have liked to see the glossary continue. I miss trapped chests, flying potions and spells, ships and striders and teleport/recall spells too, but overall I am happy with Oblivion. I'll keep busy by reading the in-game books until an expansion is released
I am not particularly fond of paying for modules either though. I figured content downloads on the XBOX Live Marketplace would cost money (as that's pretty much the norm for games on XBOX Live! -- sadly, you pay more for an XBOX 360 version of a game only to have to shell out more cash when patches or trivial content additions are relased). I was surprised to hear that PC users also had to pay for the content updates. I think Microsoft has corrupted Bethesda; I would not even pay $0.10 for the horse armor packs, because horses are a vanity feature. All of my characters can run faster than even the most expensive horse, they're fun to steal though.
You sir are on crack. SONY still has a large line of consumer electronics that put differentiate them from their competition. SONY's one of the few companies with 1080p displays on the market at the moment, they're also the only company with a 400-disc DVD/SA-CD changer. SONY's no longer the dominant force they once were, but they are by no means a company with "no products."
It's not surprising that consumers trust SONY more than most consumer electronics companies. They (used to) have one the best track records for inovation, while at the same time, were one of the best-known manufacturers of proprietary technology. Features such as Control S (cables connecting SONY components that would extend the capabilities of IR control), and MemoryStick are present on just about any recent mid- to high-level SONY equipment these days, while competitors chose to ignore the concept or adopt a technology that is not owned by SONY (such as SD or Compact Flash). It does not phase me that SONY's the only major backer of MemoryStick technology; I own all SONY TVs and cameras, so the media's universal in my household. With SONY you're guaranteed (almost stubbornly) that SONY device A will work well with SONY device B right out of the box. Personally, my loyalty to SONY lies in the phenomenal quality of their high-end Trinitron CRT displays; which, unfortunately, are being phased out in both the professional computer display and consumer electronic markets. They have their faults, particularly the recent lack-luster array of features in newer devices when compared to competitors, but I do not mind paying the SONY premium, especially considering the quality of warranty service SONY offers for its high-end equipment.
SONY does manufacture some pretty crappy things, such as their universal remote controls and car audio equipment. But for the most part, the markets they are not a total joke in, they have pretty strong loyalty.
Texas Instruments has announced plans to revive its flux capacitor project.
My PDA cost $600... granted it has the clearest 4" LCD money can buy. What kind of crappy display is this Origami thing going to have for $600-$1,000? I own a laptop and a PDA, I would prefer to keep the two devices separate - I would rather not have one device that sucks as a PDA and sucks as a laptop but has the novelty of being both.
Any idiot with a disassembler can locate a CPUID instruction with minimal effort... I have written many NOCD patches myself in the past and it often takes 30 minutes to an hour to find the conditional jump(s) that branch the execution when a CD is not present. Unless Skype checks the checksum of the binary, this is hardly news worthy.
I tend to think on the contrary... consoles are converging with the PC platform rather than diverging. With standard USB ports, support for PC input devices, built-in network connectivity, hard drive storage, the ancient shift from cartridges to CDs and DVDs, VGA output, and a whole host of other features, consoles are looking more and more like inexpensive general purpose computers (again).
That said, the two platforms do have advantages, but a lot of them creep their way into the other; such as gamepads for PC games and keyboard/mouse support on consoles.
In the past it might have been reasonable to dismiss the idea of PC/Console interaction, but as SquareEnix has shown interoperability is not as hard as it sounds. The PS2 and XBOX 360 both have two standard USB ports on the front and support keyboards and mice, so the argument of user input is not as strong as it used to be. Granted, fonts need to be bigger so that text is legible on piss poor standard definition televisions, but WOW's existing interface is already well suited. Blizzard already uses a braindead "patcher", which would lend itself well to the XBOX Live Marketplace model for content updates; on an unrelated note, much of their customer base is equally braindead -- which is why I only played the game for a couple of months. Do not get me wrong, I could not care less about WOW... on any platform, but I do not think an XBOX 360 port would necessarily compromise the "WOW experience." The majority of Blizzard's customer base -- 12-year-old fanboys -- will be equally annoying no matter what platform they play on.
I own a 4 year old Toshiba laptop with a 15" LCD that has a native resolution of 1600x1200. Newer laptops come with even larger displays and 16:9/16:10 displays are a fad right now. These displays, despite their significant advantage with horizontal screen realestate, have fewer lines of horizontal resolution. I have considered buying a new laptop a couple of times now, but I am always discouraged by the giant leap backward in resolution. I cannot justify paying $2,000+ for a laptop that runs at a lower resolution than the one I have now... when you get used to high DPI displays (1600x1200 @ 15" or 2048x1536 @ 21") it is actually painful/annoying to look at large, low resolution displays.
SPEs, not SPFs :)
Indeed, that is one of the reasons IBM is so proud of their new Cell architecture. It was designed to reduce the latency between CPU and RAM, perhaps more out of necessity than by choice. IBM wanted to reduce the complexity of the processor by moving a lot of the out-of-order-execution, register renaming, branch prediction, etc... logic off the silicon and into the compiler. Transmetta tried the same thing in the past, but found it only compounded memory latency issues. It works out for the Cell architecture, however, since it is designed around parallelism -- with a lot of the complexity dumped on the compiler, there is a lot more room on the die for more SPFs, cache and other logic. It should be interesting to see if the theory actually works beyond paper... it sounds like playing musical chairs with bottlenecks and praying compiler developers will do the really hard work. ;)
Apparently, Acclaim does not quite grasp the concept that you need to charge money for your products if you do not want to hemerage money. Of course, that only works if the products you publish are worth paying money for.
Oh and let us not forget the brainfsck when these teachers were told to "right click," or press "ALT" to perform some task... That gave me a chuckle the first time I heard a teacher get confused by either of those two things ;)
Teachers, at least when I was in grade school, were too busy and in some cases dare I say stupid, to learn how to use new programs and operating systems. I remember the hell incured in my Senior year when my high school switched from ancient Apple hardware to bleeding edge Pentium 3 DELL machines with Windows 98. The attendance system worked maybe 2 out of 3 days in the week, teachers spent half their time figuring out how to use their grade books and students were constantly fscking the machines up, because the school did not have a decent PC system administrator. Granted, any two-bit hack could use the Windows XP policy editor to restrict priviliges, but this was Windows 98 we were talking about, and a school that had always used Macintosh systems.
Given quality applications for attendance, grading and E-Mail I do not think the platform matters too much. But switching to a new platform without thoroughly educating the teachers beforehand is a recipie for disaster. School children will learn whatever system you put in front of them, so they are not so much the issue.
Nintendo Power ... controllers (not the magazine) were not exactly what you would call a success. When was the last time you saw someone using a Power Glove ... 1989? Nintendo and SEGA both had stupid pads on the floor with IR sensors that added little to games that used them. Gamers are fatter than ever, if the idea did not go over well in the late to early 90s what makes anyone think it is going to go over well now? :)
The Intel C++ compiler and VTune are handy tools for writing parallelized x86 code. However, until recently such code was only practical for server code, as HyperThreading was the best a typical desktop machine could do running multiple threads. Except for the legacy CPU particle engine I worked on, I never really put much effort into optimizing this way and I know most other game programmers were the same. Time spent tuning code for a CPU architecture that your target hardware spec. does not have does not make a lot of sense.
I am sure that just as programmable GPUs changed the way 3D engines are designed, multi-core CPUs and the Cell architecture will see a lot of coverage in future GDCs. If you teach new developers to think in terms of parallelization from day one, they probably will not be as overwhelmed by Cell as us dinosaurs are.
This is an educated guess at best, but would not programmers in teir IV tend to write code that stands little to nothing to gain by Cell's parallell architecture? I mean, engine programmers would be in tier I - III, the menial tasks would be tier IV. I do not see controller polling and other boring game logic benefiting greatly by using more than one SPE. Matrix and vector math, on the other hand, have potential - but a good optimizing compiler can optimize that stuff without a lot of hints.
If this compiler is truly intended to make unoptimized tier IV code Cell friendly, it had better do an extremely good job simplifying branches -- since the SPEs are highly pipelined and branching can stall for up to 18 cycles. A lot of highlevel programmers never think about the consequences of branch misprediction even though they write some of the most branch-heavy code. Compiler optimization feedback is nice, but I do not think tier IV programmers look for or even know what to do with it.
The features you describe are part of the XBOX 360 dashboard, the other crap I was refering to has to do with the XBOX Live server infrastructure. Rankings, leaderboards, matchmaking, etc... none of it is relevant for a cross-platform MMOG. And if the XBOX Live Marketplace is used for updates, a player will have to download each update individually, kind of like the stupid WOW updater that makes you download 5 separate updates to go from version X.3 to X.8. The XBOX Live infrastructure is great for games that do not have dedicated servers (XBOX Live matches dynamically create server instances) and do not have frequent content updates and patches, but it clearly was not designed with MMOGs in mind - which was the point of this article.
DSLOA was a disappointingly short game that was touted an expansion pack, but did not require the original title to play. The difference of course, is that DSLOA provided a copy of the original game to distract newcomers (including the original singleplayer campaign); HL2: Episode 1 is apparently a 4-6 hour singleplayer game with DeathMatch, but not the original HL2 singleplayer content. The article says this expansion will be $20, which still seems high for a game that is only projected to take 4-6 hours... Valve must be banking on DeathMatch.
Microsoft has had a nasty habit in the original XBOX Live service of charging its customers no less than $5.00 for the most trivial of content updates. Though to be honest, I don't know why an MMORPG would want to use the XBOX Live infrastructure when they already have their own proprietary infrastructure. Short of letting others know a GamerTag has their 360 turned on and logged into XBOX 360, the rest of the XBOX Live crap is just a nusiance to developers and subscribers. I'd be really frustrated if everytime I started Generic MMORPG X on my 360 I had to login to XBOX Live, select an in-game menu "check for updates," which like all other XBOX Live titles boots you out of the game into the XBOX Live Marketplace, where you have to restart the game countless more times before you can actually play it.
I have read on more than one occasion where a person fancies the idea of cosmic radiation causing extinctions on Earth. It seems to me, however, that if it had happened in the past it would have sterilized even the most resilient life on Earth; not the simple extinction of a mere handful of species. Furthermore, in addition to the Earth's magnetosphere, the Sun's - which extends over 10 billion miles (further than either of the Voyager spacecraft have traveled) - shields us from a great deal of foreign radiation.