Of course. Cars made of plain, cheap, sheet steel might look great when you first get them, but store them in a leaky garage for a few years and they'll be rusty and broken, and a real problem to drive. Cars made of "Exotic" materials like Aluminium and Carbon Fibre are more expensive to purchase initially, but if you left them in the same leaky garage there would be no (or at least fewer) problems with rusting or breaking down.
So, how exactly did you fix bugs in games after they were shipped? You couldn't? Then you know nothing about what this entire conversation is about. Oh, and it's not MS that's locking the XBox, it's the games publishers, because they want to kill the second hand market.
I don't know about now, but the way MS support used to work is that you were charged for filing a report, but if the report was a bug and a new/not publicly available patch was required your fee was refunded or you got a "support event" that you could use instead of being charged. It was meant as a way of giving people a financial incentive to actually RTFDocumentation, and/or to seek help through one of their free alternatives, like MSDN, MS newsgroups, support fora and the like.
$40,000 is approximately what it would cost to store and deliver 150 MB to 14 million people with Amazon CloudFront.
That's Call of Duty MW3 numbers using a 3rd party CDN at regular pricing.
I think it's safe to say MSFT is gouging on patch delivery.
As of January 9, 2012, 66 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold worldwide
If your target market is more than a quarter of the sold 360's (16.5 million), then MSFT are undercharging, by your figures. And your cost analysis doesn't include any compatibility, QA, or security testing. It's also meant as a disincentive for releasing broken games first then patching later. I think it's safe to say MSFT is doing the right thing on patch delivery, as much as that will unfortunately hurt small developers. Perhaps they could introduce some kind of "rate-based" patch charge instead - Patches cost $1,000 + 0.1% retail profit.
I would like someone to define "Canadian culture" for me, because I can't seem to find a single one that you can call "Canadian."
Is it English Canada or French Canada, or is it Polish, Scottish, Chinese, or Malaysian?
Yes. Canadian culture is defined by the people who make it, be they English, French, Polish, Scot, Chinese, Malay, Ukranian, Vietnamese, Cree, Inuit, or whatever. It's the distinct combination of all these peoples and cultures in an inclusive manner that makes the Canadian culture so unique. Canada is the product of the melting pot of it's people.
Horse Hockey is a contraction of "Horse Hockey-Pucks". The hockey-pucks, in this case, being the dropped excrement that forms small(ish) round discs when it hits the road.
The rest of Canada has it's own cultural identities. For instance, the "Mosaic" festival put on every year here in Regina, Sask, highlights all the various cultures that are around the city/province, including Chinese, Indian (from India, rather than "First Nations", or whatever we're calling them this year), Aboriginal, Ukranian, German, Polish, Irish, Scottish, Korean, and many many more groups, all who are more than capable of keeping their own culture, history and traditions without having it be mandated by law.
Quebec, on the other hand, is so scared and incapable of keeping it's own culture that is has to mandate rules and restrictions by law to prevent any outside influences creeping in. For instance, in Canada, public signage must be dual-language, English and French. In Quebec, any signage in English (Even if it's dual-language) will get you a hefty fine. Quebec has voted on separating from Canada several times, and each time the referendum failed. The problem is that some of Quebec wants to separate completely from Canada, but to keep the Canadian Government jobs, social security, healthcare, army, and money. They also asked France for their support, which was strongly denied.
Like "Cheese"? The slices of pre-packaged plastic that the Americans call "Cheese" is about as far from curdled milk as you can get. Even their "Cheddar" tastes nothing like real cheese, what with it being aged all of 25 seconds. When you have to get "Extra-Old" cheese just to get some semblance of flavour out of it, you know something's wrong.
"American food" is the processed, mechanically separated and joylessly deconstructed remains of what once was a fine meal, broken down into it's constituent chemical compounds, flavoured, stabilized and preserved until it will outlast the heat-death of the universe, then machine-packaged into too-small or too-large ("Individual" or "Family sized") individually measured portions, and flash heated and irradiated to ensure that anything that was even vaguely living or had the remote chance of providing any kind of flavour or texture is well and truly dead.
Exhibit A: The Twinkie. Exhibit B: Spray "Cheese". Exhibit C: "Cool Whip". Exhibit D: "Easy Mac". Need I continue?
Given that anything that's produced with the "Canada Film and TV Tax Credit" is considered "Canned Con", this gives broadcasters lots of options:
Lost Girl
The Listener
Eureka
Warehouse 13
Sanctuary
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: Deep Space 9
Star Trek: Voyager
StarGate: SG1
StarGate Atlantis
StarGate Universe
BattleStar Galactica
Caprica
Leverage
...etc.
And these are just the ones I can recall off the top of my head (Yes, I watch a fair amount of Sci-Fi, so sue me). In fact, Spike TV runs "Trek-Mas" over Christmas here in Canada, showing every single Star Trek movie in order. There's plenty of Canned Con, and an incredible amount more than you'd think. A lot of it does also end up on US TV networks, too. The difficulty that Canada has is in competing with the TV and movie juggernaut that is Hollywood, unfortunately.
And as many SATA cards as you need to populate the bays (With 6 SATA connectors on your motherboard, you'd probably need another 2 4-port SATA cards to fill the box)
Top the lot off with a 750W+ power supply, and you're all set. Throw it in the basement, or out in the garage if it's temperature controlled (Would have problems with that up here in Canada; -40 makes for very unhappy PCs without a lot of sealing against condensation).
That'll get you (using 3TB hard-drive) 60TB of storage in a single case. You'll also have 2 free SATA ports, so you could have a separate SSD as your boot drive.
If you're going to be upgrading, you might want to switch to Serviio for your uPNP hosting, as it also handles on-the-fly transcoding into supported formats for uPNP/DLNA hosts using FFMpeg, and upgrading the CPU to enable real-time HD transcoding. Then you can store your media in the best format you can (Native from source, or x264/DTS if the source is raw), and not have to worry about having multiple copies around to deal with client compatibility.
This can all be done incrementally, too, especially if you don't have the funds for it on-hand at the moment (who does?).
I pay a content provider a subscription for a show. For instance, $0.75 for a season of House without ads, or $0.05 for a season of House with ads. $1.50 for a season of "The Daily Show" without ads. $10.00 for a restart of Firefly without ads (Yes, I went there), and so on. The greater the demand, the less the cost (and, obviously, the greater the show run, or the more cost to create, the higher the subscription cost). This will put much more money in the hands of the content providers directly, rather than having the cable middlemen taking a large chunk, and will still keep all but the most obsessive tv-watcher's cable bill at about the same price as it already is.
Content providers can poll me on my interests for new shows. They can also use those interests to customize the ads I get, if I am agreeing to get ads.
The content provider releases episodes on their regular schedule via a private BitTorrent tracker (or similar methods) in a DRM-unencumbered format, so I can watch it on any device I choose. This releasing is done using a customized-to-the-user RSS feed (only the shows I subscribe to from that provider appear in that feed), which is secured using HTTPS and a unique "user key". Trailers and pilot episodes for new shows can also be published on the RSS feed (especially if they may match my recorded interests). Keys cannot be shared, and abuse of such will result in the key being revoked (or at least, changed, so the user has to update his client with the new key if he wishes to continue, which will make it difficult enough to make sharing of feeds like this unfeasable).
News channels and current events can be subscribed to for live streaming using Multicast (preferably) or Unicast systems, in much the same way.
Cable companies can then become "content aggregators" or local CDNs, So rather than having to go to hundreds of different content providers, you can just subscribe through your cable company, and they aggregate all the available feeds for you and serve your content to you from local servers. Of course, going directly to the source is still an option, if you wish to track more directly, or if your particular cable company doesn't carry that provider's content. Cable companies can then either add a small surcharge to the price of each subscription, or charge a "content distribution" fee for running the local cache.
Emergency broadcasts can be implemented with special RSS feed items, or signed and timestamped playlist files that point to a live stream, to be picked up and (dis)played immediately by boxes or computer systems. This is about the only part that isn't possible right now, and I shouldn't think it'd take that much work to implement.
This way, when you go to the TV, there's always something you're interested in watching available. You never miss an episode of your favourite shows, and you directly support the people who make it.You don't have to get, and don't have to watch, anything you don't want to, and you can do whatever you like with what you've paid for. It also means that niche shows don't get canned, and providers have a completely accurate dollar-based view of just how popular shows really are (rather than having to rely on a very limited number of Nielsen households), and it also means that shows aren't competing for ratings by being forced into a timeslot, giving a false impression of popularity (or lack thereof). It would also make it easier for indie TV producers to get up and running. You'd probably also have a fast addition to Google in the form of "Which provider makes this TV show".
Unfortunately, the way Hollywood, and the MPAA/RIAA/Media fatcats see the TV industry, and television consumers as a whole, this will never come to pass. They are so much more fond of their walled gardens and "Prime time slot"s that the idea of abandoning them and allowing people to live their lives not beholden to their scheduling whims is abhorrent. It would be so very nice, but I hold out little hope in it happening. And
Perhaps, though proper QoS on your system could mitigate any bandwidth issues even while playing, and restricting serving to one of the (now many) cores available in modern systems will ensure the load is minimal. But do bear in mind you have to sleep sometimes. So while you're asleep, your rig can be serving content to all comers.
Enforcing that kind of thing, with that many people around, is next to impossible. Fortunately, most games these days won't connect to multiplayer servers if they've been pirated (unless the server is also modified to allow unauthenticated clients, and an alternate server list is provided/used). But given that LAN bandwidth is considerably greater (100/1000 Mbit, as opposed to 1-5 Mbit) than internet bandwidth (well, usually - in this case, with a 120GB connection maybe not so much), SMB or FTP is a more viable option.
5. "A new life awaits on the Outer Colonies! Let's go to the Colonies!"
6. "For the memory of a lifetime, Rekall rekall rekall..."
7. "Would you like to know more?"
So, basically you're saying they had to "Reverse the polarity of the ion flow"? Way to TNG it up in here. And yes, I did just use "The Next Generation" as a verb. You're welcome.
I do agree though, there is a larger weight/speed thing here in the states, we have have a lot of 55MPH 2 lane roads with only a stripe protecting people from a 110MPH closing speed offset head-on crashes. maybe the issue is our road system..
And in Europe (Well, the UK at least) there are a lot of 70MPH 2-lane roads with only a paint stripe protecting people from 140MPH closing speed crashes. The Euro-spec Smart car does fantastically well at surviving a head-on crash, as ably demonstrated here. And bear in mind (as Mythbusters showed) with 2 vehicles colliding at 70MPH, the effective speed is 70MPH, not 140.
US regulations have all kinds of stupid limitations, like having the headlights being fixed a certain distance from the road (Not allowing for adjustable height vehicles), very poorly designed lighting systems (made to dazzle oncoming drivers rather than illuminate the road), excessive large bumpers and so on. The smart was already one of the safest cars on the roads, scoring better in crash and safety tests than most other vehicles available in any class. The additions and alterations that were forced on Daimler by US regulations didn't help, merely hindered it's safety and the efficiency of the vehicle.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course. Cars made of plain, cheap, sheet steel might look great when you first get them, but store them in a leaky garage for a few years and they'll be rusty and broken, and a real problem to drive. Cars made of "Exotic" materials like Aluminium and Carbon Fibre are more expensive to purchase initially, but if you left them in the same leaky garage there would be no (or at least fewer) problems with rusting or breaking down.
Does this fulfill my nerd quotia for the day?
Voodoo 1 and 2 were 3D only. Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo 3+ had framebuffers too to be used as full video cards.
So, how exactly did you fix bugs in games after they were shipped? You couldn't? Then you know nothing about what this entire conversation is about. Oh, and it's not MS that's locking the XBox, it's the games publishers, because they want to kill the second hand market.
I don't know about now, but the way MS support used to work is that you were charged for filing a report, but if the report was a bug and a new/not publicly available patch was required your fee was refunded or you got a "support event" that you could use instead of being charged. It was meant as a way of giving people a financial incentive to actually RTFDocumentation, and/or to seek help through one of their free alternatives, like MSDN, MS newsgroups, support fora and the like.
$40,000 is approximately what it would cost to store and deliver 150 MB to 14 million people with Amazon CloudFront.
That's Call of Duty MW3 numbers using a 3rd party CDN at regular pricing.
I think it's safe to say MSFT is gouging on patch delivery.
As of January 9, 2012, 66 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold worldwide
If your target market is more than a quarter of the sold 360's (16.5 million), then MSFT are undercharging, by your figures. And your cost analysis doesn't include any compatibility, QA, or security testing. It's also meant as a disincentive for releasing broken games first then patching later. I think it's safe to say MSFT is doing the right thing on patch delivery, as much as that will unfortunately hurt small developers. Perhaps they could introduce some kind of "rate-based" patch charge instead - Patches cost $1,000 + 0.1% retail profit.
Really? Spanish? The ".it" at the end of the domain not enough of a clue for you?
No, Mozilla (re)made HTTP Push: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_technology#HTTP_server_push
IE may have introduced it in IE8, but Netscape (Remember them?) introduced it in 1995 in NS1.1, and it's supported in every browser except IE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_technology#HTTP_server_push
The difficulty that Canada has is in competing with the TV and movie juggernaut that is Hollywood, unfortunately.
I thought the difficulty was in making TV and movies look like they were shot in the US (cf. SG:SG1).
That's difficult? (cf. Fringe, Sanctuary, Eureka, Warehouse 13...).
I would like someone to define "Canadian culture" for me, because I can't seem to find a single one that you can call "Canadian."
Is it English Canada or French Canada, or is it Polish, Scottish, Chinese, or Malaysian?
Yes. Canadian culture is defined by the people who make it, be they English, French, Polish, Scot, Chinese, Malay, Ukranian, Vietnamese, Cree, Inuit, or whatever. It's the distinct combination of all these peoples and cultures in an inclusive manner that makes the Canadian culture so unique. Canada is the product of the melting pot of it's people.
Horse Hockey is a contraction of "Horse Hockey-Pucks". The hockey-pucks, in this case, being the dropped excrement that forms small(ish) round discs when it hits the road.
The rest of Canada has it's own cultural identities. For instance, the "Mosaic" festival put on every year here in Regina, Sask, highlights all the various cultures that are around the city/province, including Chinese, Indian (from India, rather than "First Nations", or whatever we're calling them this year), Aboriginal, Ukranian, German, Polish, Irish, Scottish, Korean, and many many more groups, all who are more than capable of keeping their own culture, history and traditions without having it be mandated by law.
Quebec, on the other hand, is so scared and incapable of keeping it's own culture that is has to mandate rules and restrictions by law to prevent any outside influences creeping in. For instance, in Canada, public signage must be dual-language, English and French. In Quebec, any signage in English (Even if it's dual-language) will get you a hefty fine. Quebec has voted on separating from Canada several times, and each time the referendum failed. The problem is that some of Quebec wants to separate completely from Canada, but to keep the Canadian Government jobs, social security, healthcare, army, and money. They also asked France for their support, which was strongly denied.
Like "Cheese"? The slices of pre-packaged plastic that the Americans call "Cheese" is about as far from curdled milk as you can get. Even their "Cheddar" tastes nothing like real cheese, what with it being aged all of 25 seconds. When you have to get "Extra-Old" cheese just to get some semblance of flavour out of it, you know something's wrong.
"American food" is the processed, mechanically separated and joylessly deconstructed remains of what once was a fine meal, broken down into it's constituent chemical compounds, flavoured, stabilized and preserved until it will outlast the heat-death of the universe, then machine-packaged into too-small or too-large ("Individual" or "Family sized") individually measured portions, and flash heated and irradiated to ensure that anything that was even vaguely living or had the remote chance of providing any kind of flavour or texture is well and truly dead.
Exhibit A: The Twinkie. Exhibit B: Spray "Cheese". Exhibit C: "Cool Whip". Exhibit D: "Easy Mac". Need I continue?
Given that anything that's produced with the "Canada Film and TV Tax Credit" is considered "Canned Con", this gives broadcasters lots of options:
And these are just the ones I can recall off the top of my head (Yes, I watch a fair amount of Sci-Fi, so sue me). In fact, Spike TV runs "Trek-Mas" over Christmas here in Canada, showing every single Star Trek movie in order. There's plenty of Canned Con, and an incredible amount more than you'd think. A lot of it does also end up on US TV networks, too. The difficulty that Canada has is in competing with the TV and movie juggernaut that is Hollywood, unfortunately.
So you mean they'd be relevant product placements? And this is a bad thing (Or, at least, worse than the current "system") how?
If Google buys Disney, they will fund movies by selling product placement spots.
I'm sorry, were you under the impression this doesn't already happen? How quaint.
As the "Anonymous Coward" above has suggested, you can:
Get a full tower case, something like a Lian-Li PC 80 with 12 5.25" bays
Then get 4 5-in-3 hot-swap bays
And as many SATA cards as you need to populate the bays (With 6 SATA connectors on your motherboard, you'd probably need another 2 4-port SATA cards to fill the box)
Top the lot off with a 750W+ power supply, and you're all set. Throw it in the basement, or out in the garage if it's temperature controlled (Would have problems with that up here in Canada; -40 makes for very unhappy PCs without a lot of sealing against condensation).
That'll get you (using 3TB hard-drive) 60TB of storage in a single case. You'll also have 2 free SATA ports, so you could have a separate SSD as your boot drive.
If you're going to be upgrading, you might want to switch to Serviio for your uPNP hosting, as it also handles on-the-fly transcoding into supported formats for uPNP/DLNA hosts using FFMpeg, and upgrading the CPU to enable real-time HD transcoding. Then you can store your media in the best format you can (Native from source, or x264/DTS if the source is raw), and not have to worry about having multiple copies around to deal with client compatibility.
This can all be done incrementally, too, especially if you don't have the funds for it on-hand at the moment (who does?).
I pay a content provider a subscription for a show. For instance, $0.75 for a season of House without ads, or $0.05 for a season of House with ads. $1.50 for a season of "The Daily Show" without ads. $10.00 for a restart of Firefly without ads (Yes, I went there), and so on. The greater the demand, the less the cost (and, obviously, the greater the show run, or the more cost to create, the higher the subscription cost). This will put much more money in the hands of the content providers directly, rather than having the cable middlemen taking a large chunk, and will still keep all but the most obsessive tv-watcher's cable bill at about the same price as it already is.
Content providers can poll me on my interests for new shows. They can also use those interests to customize the ads I get, if I am agreeing to get ads.
The content provider releases episodes on their regular schedule via a private BitTorrent tracker (or similar methods) in a DRM-unencumbered format, so I can watch it on any device I choose. This releasing is done using a customized-to-the-user RSS feed (only the shows I subscribe to from that provider appear in that feed), which is secured using HTTPS and a unique "user key". Trailers and pilot episodes for new shows can also be published on the RSS feed (especially if they may match my recorded interests). Keys cannot be shared, and abuse of such will result in the key being revoked (or at least, changed, so the user has to update his client with the new key if he wishes to continue, which will make it difficult enough to make sharing of feeds like this unfeasable).
News channels and current events can be subscribed to for live streaming using Multicast (preferably) or Unicast systems, in much the same way.
Cable companies can then become "content aggregators" or local CDNs, So rather than having to go to hundreds of different content providers, you can just subscribe through your cable company, and they aggregate all the available feeds for you and serve your content to you from local servers. Of course, going directly to the source is still an option, if you wish to track more directly, or if your particular cable company doesn't carry that provider's content. Cable companies can then either add a small surcharge to the price of each subscription, or charge a "content distribution" fee for running the local cache.
Emergency broadcasts can be implemented with special RSS feed items, or signed and timestamped playlist files that point to a live stream, to be picked up and (dis)played immediately by boxes or computer systems. This is about the only part that isn't possible right now, and I shouldn't think it'd take that much work to implement.
This way, when you go to the TV, there's always something you're interested in watching available. You never miss an episode of your favourite shows, and you directly support the people who make it.You don't have to get, and don't have to watch, anything you don't want to, and you can do whatever you like with what you've paid for. It also means that niche shows don't get canned, and providers have a completely accurate dollar-based view of just how popular shows really are (rather than having to rely on a very limited number of Nielsen households), and it also means that shows aren't competing for ratings by being forced into a timeslot, giving a false impression of popularity (or lack thereof). It would also make it easier for indie TV producers to get up and running. You'd probably also have a fast addition to Google in the form of "Which provider makes this TV show".
Unfortunately, the way Hollywood, and the MPAA/RIAA/Media fatcats see the TV industry, and television consumers as a whole, this will never come to pass. They are so much more fond of their walled gardens and "Prime time slot"s that the idea of abandoning them and allowing people to live their lives not beholden to their scheduling whims is abhorrent. It would be so very nice, but I hold out little hope in it happening. And
Perhaps, though proper QoS on your system could mitigate any bandwidth issues even while playing, and restricting serving to one of the (now many) cores available in modern systems will ensure the load is minimal. But do bear in mind you have to sleep sometimes. So while you're asleep, your rig can be serving content to all comers.
Enforcing that kind of thing, with that many people around, is next to impossible. Fortunately, most games these days won't connect to multiplayer servers if they've been pirated (unless the server is also modified to allow unauthenticated clients, and an alternate server list is provided/used). But given that LAN bandwidth is considerably greater (100/1000 Mbit, as opposed to 1-5 Mbit) than internet bandwidth (well, usually - in this case, with a 120GB connection maybe not so much), SMB or FTP is a more viable option.
5. "A new life awaits on the Outer Colonies! Let's go to the Colonies!"
6. "For the memory of a lifetime, Rekall rekall rekall..."
7. "Would you like to know more?"
So, basically you're saying they had to "Reverse the polarity of the ion flow"? Way to TNG it up in here. And yes, I did just use "The Next Generation" as a verb. You're welcome.
I do agree though, there is a larger weight/speed thing here in the states, we have have a lot of 55MPH 2 lane roads with only a stripe protecting people from a 110MPH closing speed offset head-on crashes. maybe the issue is our road system..
And in Europe (Well, the UK at least) there are a lot of 70MPH 2-lane roads with only a paint stripe protecting people from 140MPH closing speed crashes. The Euro-spec Smart car does fantastically well at surviving a head-on crash, as ably demonstrated here. And bear in mind (as Mythbusters showed) with 2 vehicles colliding at 70MPH, the effective speed is 70MPH, not 140.
US regulations have all kinds of stupid limitations, like having the headlights being fixed a certain distance from the road (Not allowing for adjustable height vehicles), very poorly designed lighting systems (made to dazzle oncoming drivers rather than illuminate the road), excessive large bumpers and so on. The smart was already one of the safest cars on the roads, scoring better in crash and safety tests than most other vehicles available in any class. The additions and alterations that were forced on Daimler by US regulations didn't help, merely hindered it's safety and the efficiency of the vehicle.
Sorry, Pi is copyrighted (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pOd-8AZC-k). Try Tau instead (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3174T-3-59Q).
Really? Because they've been nominated for, and won, several BAFTAs in the "Factual" sections.