Toally agree. It's stupid to think that having competition is good. Clearly, the only smartphone that is allowed to exist is the iPhone. Everything else is a rip-off because it has icons and is rectangular.
I don't see why you don't just get a system built by newegg, or ncix, or whoever. Choose some quality components (or have them choose some for you), and don't buy and OS. It's not like it's hard.
Service is usually done by replacement. If you get a phone from any retailer around here, and you have a problem with it, you bring it back and they handle it.
I use the nexus phone. My talk time is 17 hours. I've also put in the 2100 mAh battery, so it's probably now well over 20.
2560x1600 is GPU limited. Dual GTX 460s, for less than $300, will handle this at 60fps. A $2k PC is likely overkill in more than area. Granted, my PC is in that area, but it only has 3 TB of storage, and no SSDs (but a ton of RAM). PCs also have a lot of utility outside of gaming (video, photo, music storage, document editing, basic browsing and email on a large screen, etc.).
However, gamers are mainly PC enthusiasts. We are people who build the best PC for the money, or just build the best PC. We upgrade our GPUs as often as possible. We like to run benchmarks and see our scores. We even like to do things like add new coolers, buy cases with windows, add lights, fans, front panels, etc. There are 56 million of us and growing.
Also, it's many decades before video encoding can give us good latency and good quality. If you know anything about video encoding, you'll know that getting good quality requires either (a) high bitrates or (b) a large number of frames to encode with, with the tradeoff being (a) for (b). Also, real-time encoding takes a non trivial amount of processing power. These are reasons why OnLive will fail. Maybe, one day, when bitrates are high enough, or we get some incredible breakthrough in video encoding, we're not going to see a good OnLive style service. Besides, buying PCs and fancy encoding equipment (and keeping it up-to-date) and running a datacenter is very expensive - probably more than $15 per month. It seems they were selling at a loss and making it up on volume...
only 10x the base here in Canada. 50 Mbit is 2x the base. The average is 8Mbps according to youtube and speedtest.net.
But, end of the day, Onlive is failing. This isn't a surpise. Immediacy is not a priority for a gamer. Graphics are. Using his hand-built, powerful CPU/GPU system to the limit of it's capabilities is. We don't give a crap about being able to play Crysis on our iPad, or netbook. We don't mind downloads. We also have a lot of money (at least to spend on PC-related and gaming related stuff).
Nearby store? I just go to any reseller for the carrier of the phone. Over the phone support, I call google directly. They have an 800 number. They replace things like headphones for free. Battery life? I can replace mine. Battery life under use it about the same. My friends think that all smartphone battery life is too short. They are correct.
> Also, to spin your statement another way, "a decent gaming station costs twice what a base PC does".
No, it costs a few hundred more. The difference in the quality of GPU and possibly the power supply, that's it.
> I never said it was a good deal for a service. Perhaps part of the idea here is that since it's a streaming service you don't have to be on your own PC at home. You can take it anywhere there's a PC with a decent Internet connection.
Definitely an appeal, but not enough to overcome the crappiness of the service. Also, it seems gamer just don't care.
Before iCloud, iTunes was needed. You still need iTunes to get music/video from your computer to your phone. Android has always been OTA. With iOS, it's relatively new.
As a non-OSX user, the iPhone "just not works", at all. You need iTunes to do pretty much anything with it, and iTunes is an abortion of a piece of software, at least on windows. My android works with everything I already have installed. There is no effort, and an android phone is a self-contained unit that does not require any external software at all. Also, voice is managed better (I'm on android 4.1), and the maps app gives me traffic reports. I can unlock my phone using tools provided by google, which isn't important for non-technical people, but it is vital for me. I've one-on-oned my phone with my friends' iphones. My phone does better in every function, except for in-browser HLS streaming. I also use widgets so I can check email and the calendar without having to launch an app. Google account integration trounces Apple account integration, since I just have to "log in" to my phone. The iPhone, however, has a more unified look, and I do like the way the glass and metal feels.
"it just works" applies to all phones these days. Some things are more painful using iOS. For example, I think iTunes is the worst software abortion I've seen in a long time. It's a vector for browser based attacks. It has a trojan virus-like update mechanism that wants to install Quicktime, Safari, Bonjour, etc. on my system. So in short, "It just works" after you perform and accept the required setup, whereas Android "just works" with what I have right now on Windows and Linux.
> In the really long term obviously most game services are going this direction, but I think they're too far ahead of the curve to make enough money to cling to life for another decade or so.
Steam? I have a 250 Mbit connection at home. I can pull down an entire steam game in about 5 min. When it's installed, I play it at 60 fps at 2560x1600.
Streaming a video of the game is never, ever going to be as good as rendering locally. Processing power is affordable and scales because it's easily distributed. Concentrating the processing power is more efficient for power but extremely expensive to scale because someone has to go buy a large number of gaming class machines, put them in a data center, attach additional encoding hardware, and then have a network with enough bandwidth to stream nearly raw video at resolutions up to 2560x1600 (and one day soon 4k). This is just not going to happen for a very very long time - likely much longer than a decade. Also, encoding a video of a game running is never going to be as good quality an experience as running it locally. Encoders need to look at several frames to do a good job. 3-6 frames isn't enough, and never will be. 300-600 frames works ok. More is better. Also, the enthusiast market for PCs will need to disappear, but it is, in fact, growing. It also happens to be the biggest, richest chunk of the gaming market - these guys make the whole gaming market larger than the music and movie market combined.
If course all of these game run extremely well on just a $800 PC these days, which is just $300 more than, say your base $300 desktop. In addition, the game come in at 720p at best, and the encoding quality is crap and always will be because the encoding windows is a fraction of a second long. The result? A home gaming PC is better value.
Also, those who play games are often computer enthusiasts already, and like to build and upgrade their own systems as a hobby. It's no surprise that OnLive didn't get widespread adoption. Most people on iPads are happy with tower defense, puzzel games, and angry birds. Wrong market.
Once upon a time you could buy a mbp and add aftermarket RAM yourself. Now you have to pay apple the full pop. I'm amazed people paid for the apple upgades at all, considering they could save hundreds for the same thing with minimal, simple DIY. While the new mbp is a nice laptop to look at (as all mbps are), my test unit still falls way short in the performance department. I guess that's what you pay for battery life.
> Apple is also safe because most of *those* people have never tried nor want to try an android device.
^ I stand by this. I meet people with iPhones all over the place, daily, who don't have a clue what Android has to offer. They never looked. They don't care.
There aren't enough enterprise alternatives, and the reason is because MS does the enterprise very well. Also there is a lot of legacy software various companies use for their workflows, and those were written on MS software. Since MS software works well for enterprise, naturally they have no need nor desire to change.
Also, people forget that Apple is a hardware company - in particular, they are the iPhone company (the majority of their revenue is the iPhone. iPads, Macs, iPods, iTunes, and ATV combines make less money than the iPhone. Apple has a deadly fear of Android for this reason, and it's showing.
Not that they actually have any cause for concern yet, because tons of people clearly still love iphones. Apple is also safe because most of those people have never tried nor want to try an android device.
Why do you need truck loads of money in order to start spending? Can't you spend a little if you're making a little? One thing is certain, stock-piling a ton of money is one way NOT to help the economy.
Actually, you only need to disable windows defender to modify the hosts file. Once the modification is done, windows defender seems to happily ensure it does not change again on it's watch.
Just because valve and blizzard aren't fans of windows 8, doesn't mean that suddenly windows is going to fall off the map for gamers. They will just continue to use Win7, and wait until Win9. The problem valve/blizzard have is that damned win8 app store, which could possibly erode their business over time.
Personally, I think win8 is fine, but the start screen is pretty bad on the desktop. The rest of the OS has good things going on, good enough for me to forgive the metro crap.
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Toally agree. It's stupid to think that having competition is good. Clearly, the only smartphone that is allowed to exist is the iPhone. Everything else is a rip-off because it has icons and is rectangular.
I don't see why you don't just get a system built by newegg, or ncix, or whoever. Choose some quality components (or have them choose some for you), and don't buy and OS. It's not like it's hard.
> The tablet market is huge
Not yet, really. But it is growing. 80 million tablets is still small compared to 1 billion laptops/PCs.
I think you can pretty much say that about anyone. You do know that the modern tablet concept came from MS, right?
> not even they replaced the Desktop for some iOS-like fullscreen-only interface.
MS didn't either. The desktop is still there. Run Win8 in a virtual, you'll find you pretty much never will have to use metro if you don't want to.
Since they are now working 20 extra hours per week, their total weekly working time has gone up to 21 hours thanks to BYOD. Yay for progress.
Service is usually done by replacement. If you get a phone from any retailer around here, and you have a problem with it, you bring it back and they handle it.
I use the nexus phone. My talk time is 17 hours. I've also put in the 2100 mAh battery, so it's probably now well over 20.
The support line is linked here: http://support.google.com/nexus/?hl=en
2560x1600 is GPU limited. Dual GTX 460s, for less than $300, will handle this at 60fps. A $2k PC is likely overkill in more than area. Granted, my PC is in that area, but it only has 3 TB of storage, and no SSDs (but a ton of RAM). PCs also have a lot of utility outside of gaming (video, photo, music storage, document editing, basic browsing and email on a large screen, etc.).
However, gamers are mainly PC enthusiasts. We are people who build the best PC for the money, or just build the best PC. We upgrade our GPUs as often as possible. We like to run benchmarks and see our scores. We even like to do things like add new coolers, buy cases with windows, add lights, fans, front panels, etc. There are 56 million of us and growing.
Also, it's many decades before video encoding can give us good latency and good quality. If you know anything about video encoding, you'll know that getting good quality requires either (a) high bitrates or (b) a large number of frames to encode with, with the tradeoff being (a) for (b). Also, real-time encoding takes a non trivial amount of processing power. These are reasons why OnLive will fail. Maybe, one day, when bitrates are high enough, or we get some incredible breakthrough in video encoding, we're not going to see a good OnLive style service. Besides, buying PCs and fancy encoding equipment (and keeping it up-to-date) and running a datacenter is very expensive - probably more than $15 per month. It seems they were selling at a loss and making it up on volume...
only 10x the base here in Canada. 50 Mbit is 2x the base. The average is 8Mbps according to youtube and speedtest.net.
But, end of the day, Onlive is failing. This isn't a surpise. Immediacy is not a priority for a gamer. Graphics are. Using his hand-built, powerful CPU/GPU system to the limit of it's capabilities is. We don't give a crap about being able to play Crysis on our iPad, or netbook. We don't mind downloads. We also have a lot of money (at least to spend on PC-related and gaming related stuff).
Nearby store? I just go to any reseller for the carrier of the phone. Over the phone support, I call google directly. They have an 800 number. They replace things like headphones for free. Battery life? I can replace mine. Battery life under use it about the same. My friends think that all smartphone battery life is too short. They are correct.
> $300 + $300 = $800. Okaaaay.
Typo, obviously.
> Also, to spin your statement another way, "a decent gaming station costs twice what a base PC does".
No, it costs a few hundred more. The difference in the quality of GPU and possibly the power supply, that's it.
> I never said it was a good deal for a service. Perhaps part of the idea here is that since it's a streaming service you don't have to be on your own PC at home. You can take it anywhere there's a PC with a decent Internet connection.
Definitely an appeal, but not enough to overcome the crappiness of the service. Also, it seems gamer just don't care.
Before iCloud, iTunes was needed. You still need iTunes to get music/video from your computer to your phone. Android has always been OTA. With iOS, it's relatively new.
I can't imagine refreshing a $2000+ laptop after just two years. Seriously?
As a non-OSX user, the iPhone "just not works", at all. You need iTunes to do pretty much anything with it, and iTunes is an abortion of a piece of software, at least on windows. My android works with everything I already have installed. There is no effort, and an android phone is a self-contained unit that does not require any external software at all. Also, voice is managed better (I'm on android 4.1), and the maps app gives me traffic reports. I can unlock my phone using tools provided by google, which isn't important for non-technical people, but it is vital for me. I've one-on-oned my phone with my friends' iphones. My phone does better in every function, except for in-browser HLS streaming. I also use widgets so I can check email and the calendar without having to launch an app. Google account integration trounces Apple account integration, since I just have to "log in" to my phone. The iPhone, however, has a more unified look, and I do like the way the glass and metal feels.
"it just works" applies to all phones these days. Some things are more painful using iOS. For example, I think iTunes is the worst software abortion I've seen in a long time. It's a vector for browser based attacks. It has a trojan virus-like update mechanism that wants to install Quicktime, Safari, Bonjour, etc. on my system. So in short, "It just works" after you perform and accept the required setup, whereas Android "just works" with what I have right now on Windows and Linux.
> In the really long term obviously most game services are going this direction, but I think they're too far ahead of the curve to make enough money to cling to life for another decade or so.
Steam? I have a 250 Mbit connection at home. I can pull down an entire steam game in about 5 min. When it's installed, I play it at 60 fps at 2560x1600.
Streaming a video of the game is never, ever going to be as good as rendering locally. Processing power is affordable and scales because it's easily distributed. Concentrating the processing power is more efficient for power but extremely expensive to scale because someone has to go buy a large number of gaming class machines, put them in a data center, attach additional encoding hardware, and then have a network with enough bandwidth to stream nearly raw video at resolutions up to 2560x1600 (and one day soon 4k). This is just not going to happen for a very very long time - likely much longer than a decade. Also, encoding a video of a game running is never going to be as good quality an experience as running it locally. Encoders need to look at several frames to do a good job. 3-6 frames isn't enough, and never will be. 300-600 frames works ok. More is better. Also, the enthusiast market for PCs will need to disappear, but it is, in fact, growing. It also happens to be the biggest, richest chunk of the gaming market - these guys make the whole gaming market larger than the music and movie market combined.
If course all of these game run extremely well on just a $800 PC these days, which is just $300 more than, say your base $300 desktop. In addition, the game come in at 720p at best, and the encoding quality is crap and always will be because the encoding windows is a fraction of a second long. The result? A home gaming PC is better value.
Also, those who play games are often computer enthusiasts already, and like to build and upgrade their own systems as a hobby. It's no surprise that OnLive didn't get widespread adoption. Most people on iPads are happy with tower defense, puzzel games, and angry birds. Wrong market.
Once upon a time you could buy a mbp and add aftermarket RAM yourself. Now you have to pay apple the full pop. I'm amazed people paid for the apple upgades at all, considering they could save hundreds for the same thing with minimal, simple DIY. While the new mbp is a nice laptop to look at (as all mbps are), my test unit still falls way short in the performance department. I guess that's what you pay for battery life.
> MBP is a professional workstation
How, with it's dual-core (ok, now quad-core stock) and consumer-grade gpu, processor, and RAM is it a professional workstation? Do tell...
> Apple is also safe because most of *those* people have never tried nor want to try an android device.
^ I stand by this. I meet people with iPhones all over the place, daily, who don't have a clue what Android has to offer. They never looked. They don't care.
There aren't enough enterprise alternatives, and the reason is because MS does the enterprise very well. Also there is a lot of legacy software various companies use for their workflows, and those were written on MS software. Since MS software works well for enterprise, naturally they have no need nor desire to change.
Also, people forget that Apple is a hardware company - in particular, they are the iPhone company (the majority of their revenue is the iPhone. iPads, Macs, iPods, iTunes, and ATV combines make less money than the iPhone. Apple has a deadly fear of Android for this reason, and it's showing.
Not that they actually have any cause for concern yet, because tons of people clearly still love iphones. Apple is also safe because most of those people have never tried nor want to try an android device.
Why do you need truck loads of money in order to start spending? Can't you spend a little if you're making a little? One thing is certain, stock-piling a ton of money is one way NOT to help the economy.
Actually, you only need to disable windows defender to modify the hosts file. Once the modification is done, windows defender seems to happily ensure it does not change again on it's watch.
Just because valve and blizzard aren't fans of windows 8, doesn't mean that suddenly windows is going to fall off the map for gamers. They will just continue to use Win7, and wait until Win9. The problem valve/blizzard have is that damned win8 app store, which could possibly erode their business over time.
Personally, I think win8 is fine, but the start screen is pretty bad on the desktop. The rest of the OS has good things going on, good enough for me to forgive the metro crap.
> people that are riding the iHate wave
Yes, yes, of course. "Do as I say, not as I do."