Consumers see netbook fail because flash is really slow.
If half of the 'interactive web2.0' wasn't powered by flash we wouldn't have this problem.
There is no reason a P3 performance chip cannot deliver an OK browsing experience even with AJAX-y rich sites, but throw flash into the mix - unaccelerated - and its foobar.
And the linux zealots - flash is even worse in linux than windows. Yes I know the reasons (I'm a fedora man).
How much investing have you done? companies claiming people are 'on board' is different from nuts and bolts details about what is actually going on. Have EA say pledged cold, hard, defined resources to port all upcoming and lots of old titles to this new platform? What about the studios themselves, are they doing it themselves as an added requirement or are EA parachuting in people over the top to do like a 'console port', can you imagine the resources required if they had to port all major releases, let alone back catalog?
Custom built machines, custom OS, custom virtualisation, custom compression, custom ASICs, custom everything. I reiterate: if I had that much time and investment capital to throw at a problem, I would not be looking to do thin client gaming.
Also what happens w/ each hardware and software change? DirectX12, oh look I have to rewrite my entire stack. Oh look Larrabee or whatever, new drivers, test with every game, etc. Sounds like a management nightmare, magic virtualisation bullet or not.
And crappy last mile will remove half their potential market anyway, colo or not. And how many colos is he going to do? How many custom datacentres are they building? WTF the mind boggles at the scale involved. Why not a million people just buy a million xboxes indeed, what with the cost coming down all the time.
Even if they get game publishers/dev houses on board, what 'servers' will they run this on?
All 'normal' apps run the same on a single socket or a quad cpu monster or in vmware. But these are games designed to use the GPU. All multigpu standards/infrastructure is designed for openGL (not directx) specifically for either GPGPU or renderfarms. We're talking a huge amount of very custom development work. How are they even going to put multiple GPUs in per server? Are they getting custom mobos with 128 PCIE lanes each or something? Running games in their magic vmware variant over FC in their magic esx chassis that can accomodate multiple banks of gaming cards?
The mind boggles, its possible sure but if you got that much money to throw at the problem, why look at a problem in search of a solution? Consoles are perfectly fine and getting cheaper all the time.
"may be working to change the actual structure of the network itself to support the game"
sorry, that phrase alone qualifies as a total fail.
I have a magic network bullet that does not require ripping up all current standards and infrastructure, which I will use to deliver thin client gaming as my first big bang step. riiiiiight
lets talk about the economics and management aspect of all these game 'servers'.... what a total nightmare... what are all publishers going to fine tune custom versions of their games to run on onlive's platforms? games - apps - that are NOT ABLE TO BE VIRTUALISED with current tech - oh wait, I also have a magic virtualisation bullet which I will use.... to deliver thin client gaming
I will then also use my magic video compression bullet.... to deliver thin client gaming
speak for yourself and your linksys mate, I might be an armchair video compression analyst but as for IP networking and enterprise class server infrastructure, I and many on slashdot am far from armchair, and this is so unbelievably difficult/complex that if they did have all their ducks in a row, I would imagine they would have better things to do than do thin client gaming
like, ooh i dunno, revolutionise bing or yahoo's or amazon's backend in a way that can compete with google, heck get bought out by google, oh wait I'll go for a solution in search of a problem.
Exactly, their compression algorithim will have to be an absolute quantum leap in both quality and cpu efficiency i.e. magnitudes faster than anything else on the market.
And that's just the compression algorithm.
The oft hashed latency discussion aside (and I do believe colo is the only way this will be remotely possible), think about the logistics, how many hours have we all wasted getting game XYZ to run properly on hardware/driver/OS config ABC, now they have to do that for all the games they support.... games that cannot be virtualised.... OMG think of the hardware MANAGEMENT alone. (shudders)
and I love the f-cktards who diss the technical sceptics with phrases like 'change the actual structure of the network itself to support the game' (thanks LS, you're an idiot), if they had a way of 'changing the actual structure of the network' - I'm assuming you mean a complete overhaul of the OSI layers whilst remaining backward compatible with current standards and current hardware.... sure I have a magic network bullet and sure I will use it to create gaming thin clients, coz thats the best possible use of this tech I can think of. I also have a video compression magic bullet
Older Cisco equipment can function just as well as newer for 95% of lab scenarios. You are very unlikely to be needing to use all the newer features.
Anything that can run IOS 12.3 and is newer than a decade old can do a lot more than you think. We do all our BGP testing on a stack of 2600s and 3600s and never an issue even though in production its 2800s, 3800s etc. Granted there are features that you do need the newer kit esp when syntax changes (e.g. IP SLA commands, newer netflow commands, class map based QoS to name three off the top of my head) but none of the core routing and switching features/commands has changed much since the introduction of CEF - they all do ACLs, route maps, OSPF, BGP, EIGRP, vlans, spanning tree, rapid spanning tree, IPSEC vpns. I'm speaking from an enterprise POV not a service provider but I'd imagine if you are in a telco environment you wouldn't be lacking gear.
For many minor test scenarios, you can pick a test branch office and use the good old 'reload in XYZ' command to ensure that no matter how badly you stuff it up, everything will bounce and come back (just remember NOT TO COPY RUN START lol).
Then there's the sleight of hand methods: - always ordering more for projects than you really need. Par for the course really esp as most project managers haven't a clue when it comes to the nuts and bolts of a big cisco order. - pushing for EOL replacements as early as possible, intentionally conflate end of sale with end of life. - getting stuff in for projects as early as possible, then you have a month or two to use it as test gear. - remember that your lab need not mirror reality, scale down as much as possible. e.g. to simulate a pair of 4506 multilayer switch running in VRRP, use a pair of 3560s. Use your CCO login and flash away to your hearts content (I know its breaching licencing but for test scenarios, meh).
There are many societal / peer pressures against being a gamer (for good or bad, I'm not trying into that debate). These pressures are multipled many times for girls. Hence only the *really* obsessed girls end up saying 'eff it' and gaming away.,
QED
side note: I once dated a gamer chick, ended amicably, but I always suspected she was really a lesbian
Well I'm not in the US lol so I get full choice, but unfortunately the best 3G network is on 850mhz like AT&T which nobody seems to want to support.
The N900 is unfortunately 900/2100mhz. WHich is fine for other carriers, unfortunately their network is slightly crappy compared to the one on 850Mhz, also the slight issue that I work for the one thats 850 and so get staff rates lol. But at least unlike the US you are actually free to move around, no CDMA nonsense all GSM and based on sim cards. I'm actually using a nokia 5800 right now on 2100/900 3G, the carrier in question also does 2100/900 but its noticeably crappier than their 850 network.
unfortunately I'm not so hardcore as to untie myself completey from 3G BUT BUT BUT I do get a work phone for free which means my personal phone is a bit of a luxury (ie keeping my 10 year old number alive, etc.) so I'm very much inclined towards a n900. Doubly so because I've been using nokia maps GPS since it came out and I like and trust it (google maps on droid is all well and good but I'm old fashioned, I want my data ON MY GODDAMNED LOCAL STORAGE)
I noticed the GPS wierdness re: works like lightning in AGPS mode, takes forever if you don't have a data connection. Though in fairness even EDGE is enough. The amount of data it uses is insignificant compared to say browsing or google maps, I guess I'm not in the US but here in Oz you can get a relatively cheap data pack say 200Mb for 5 bucks extra a month, which is more than enough for you to do light browsing on opera mini and AGPS. Still rip off prices I know.
The worst bit is the 100 dollar per year licence fee for turn by turn on nokia maps, and then its restricted to a region as well lol. I'm a satisfied user, used it for a year on my N82, now coming up to a year on my 5800, but with the new google maps options, also iphone now has tomtom, I wouldn't mind a shiny new n900, choices choices choices. If I plunk down another 100 thats me tied to nokia maps for another year....
On a serious note, the integration of google services is second to none, and a lot of people live pretty much on google platforms (reader, mail, etc.) . The theory is that down the track there will be lots more apps eventually than symbian or winmo. But they're not doing too well on that front by all accounts as the iphone app store is steamrollering the competition and drawing all the developer efforts.
The new turn by turn (Free) on Android 2.0 is pretty slick too, though they can pry my trusted Nokia Maps out of my cold dead hands (even if I am paying for the privilege I do like to have the maps stored locally).
And as for hackable, its not actually that open if you check it out, I'm not a dev but the linux devs I know all shun android as 'faux open source', you'll have to goog the details yourself (no pun intended). The new Nokia Maemo is the truly linux hacker friendly OS, now that is an exciting prospect (god damn you nokia release a 850Mhz 3G model pls)
US mobile carriers strangling development and wallowing in monopoly rent behaviour. Our next story: scientists believe that dogs like sniffing crotches
Seriously its so obvious that handing control to the locked down US carrier model will nerf any advantages Android provides as a common platform, and even more so in contrast to the iphone which is locked down by a single authority for better or worse. Fortunately, like linus and the linux kernel, the single authority does a pretty good job of it. Whereas with Android its like a open source hell (without the open source), every carrier is basically doing their own fork and then a pretty p1ss poor job of it in many cases.
The sooner someone comes along to provide a viable mainstream alternative that the US public will embrace, the better. Everywhere else in the world the concept of an unlocked phone and the ability to move between carriers, heck even countries, is a given. The problem is that joe public sees stuffed up android phone from Verizon (or whoever) and blame android, not verizon.
my phone can output 640x480 no problems. So can my psp. a laptop can't even do full screen standard def?
Yes I know its fine in divx or xvid or even x264 but to average joe the issues of adobe flash vs other codecs/containers/decoders whatever is moot, and flash is THE only real option for online video these days (precisely because most people can't configure their codecs/players etc.). I daresay many
Unlike Vista it doesn't sit there and grind the hard drive for no discernable reason for ages. That in itself is good enough for me! (and a sad indictment of vista)
no install, download and run one file so easy to talk them through.
free too!
I use it all the time and not having to actually install or configure anything is a killer feature. The only situation where this fails is if the user doesn't have admin rights as it needs to run a SSH server (I noticed this on some corporate builds).
Oh this is assuming its wintel of course. If its linux then they can probably handle themselves and if its OSX then it wouldn't break;)
I'm still not getting all this PVR love. Esp as a lot of it comes from US posters, who have their lovely unlimited (or nearly unlimited) download caps.
Here is backward Oz, where most people live with 20-30 gigs a month, we download everything and nobody gives a rats --- about PVR.
Your paid off the house middle age types buy the officially sanctioned 'tivo' equivalent that is locked down by the provider. Everyone else downloads everything and / or gets it off the standard morning pass-the-usb-drive around ritual @ work.
A friend of mine - who is a linux/java dev full time - runs a myth box. He has wasted far too much of his life (his words not mine) debugging the POS, spent all of last saturday trying to figure out a timing related issue whereby the audio and video goes out of sync on dvds, he reckons that the issue is totally random and not consistently reproducible e.g. patching a simple debug output affected the threading enough so that it fixed it on two of his test machines, but not on others. People working on the issue have reported varying degrees of the same bug. This issue is 6 months old. Yes, dvd playback is borked. Of course the simple solution would be to call mplayer instead but then he would have to manually reconfigure LIRC for mplayer, and so forth. The amount of bugs and issues he mentions to me on a monthly basis sounds nothing short of excruciating, esp. combined with linux graphics driver issues. And this is a guy who runs a custom compiled OS on his workstation (yes its not a distro, he compiles everything from source) and he struggles with myth.
I tried to get myth running on my old media center - I'm no dev or expert but I have been running fedora on my home 'server' since the Fedora Core 3 days, I test drive each new ubuntu and fedora release, I run a 'web appliance' w/ LAMP serving torrentflux-b4rt and ampache, squid, privoxy, ssh gateway so I am far from a newbie. After a wasted weekend - and yes all my hardware was allegedly compatible - I gave up, I didn't even get to the halfway mark so to speak.
Meanwhilst, Bill's dogshite of an OS grinds the HDD like crazy and sometimes wakes from sleep for no reason but god damn the media center bit just works and I never have to worry about it. Stick mediabrowser plugin on it for a jaw dropping, convince-nontechie-friends-they-NEED-a-mediacenter effect. I feel nauseated for advocating a wintel solution but in this case its just better than the alternatives (including appletv).
Hosted a L4D server fine w/ a Pentium M 1.6Ghz laptop / 512Mb RAM, which was also running squid+privoxy caching, and a web-ui bittorrent/usenet downloading facility (torrentflux-b4rt to be precise - a php frontend calling transmissioncli and nzbperl and parsing the output back to web via the php scripts).
Having said that, with buddies in the same city and with a fast 2Mb upstream connection (ADSL2+ w/ AnnexM) and v low pings (lower than 20ms) between us via command line, they were getting ~70ms latency IN GAME which corresponds with what you said. Even when CPU usage was well below 50-60%. Not sure why the latency was there but I suspect it was not to do with the networking infrastructure since CLI pings from my router to my friends' router were consistently well below that.
Mate if you can't port forward / open firewall ports to get borderlands to work, then how are you getting any other port forwarding requirements to work for anything else?
took me less than 5 minutes and most of that was spent in notepad cutting and pasting lines out of access lists (in addition to static NAT mappings, I am running a CBAC firewall so I need to open that up in my router as well), for a typical point and click home router gui I can't see how it could have been difficult. Esp if you have a DMZ option. Did you remember to open up your PC's firewall as well?
Agreed though that for non technical gamers its a no-no, and explains why you can't join 3 out of 4 servers visible. I just start a game labelled 'ports open' myself and people flock to it instantly, I get 0 ping, it works for me... but damn I wish it was steam and had a dedicated server (steam + dedicated left4dead server = good times)
Either you are intravenously hooked up to electronic equipment (and need to get out a bit more, even by slashdot standards or you have waaaaay overestimated your consumption. )
Granted where I am quotas are standard so we're used to it but I have no problems living under a 60Gbyte cap. It lets me download two-three full games, ditto in HD movies, more SDTV movies, a few seasons of TV and more music than I can shake a stick at, and still have enough left over for general browsing and VPN to work. Oh and hosting a left4dead server.
How do you actually watch the 200 gigabytes worth of TV you download?!!
You've also got an allergy to engineering reality.
POPULATION DENSITY
Sure there is a lot of telco BS in the mix but the bottom line is that population density in some places makes it not ECONOMICALLY viable . Studies for Australia's proposed FTTH have come up with rough costings of $215AUD (thats nearly 200 USD) per household assuming uptake rate of 80%.
Then again never let the facts get in the way of a semi-geek high horse. 'just upgrade the damn network' LOL
Slashdot Mirror
Consumers see netbook fail because flash is really slow.
If half of the 'interactive web2.0' wasn't powered by flash we wouldn't have this problem.
There is no reason a P3 performance chip cannot deliver an OK browsing experience even with AJAX-y rich sites, but throw flash into the mix - unaccelerated - and its foobar.
And the linux zealots - flash is even worse in linux than windows. Yes I know the reasons (I'm a fedora man).
How much investing have you done? companies claiming people are 'on board' is different from nuts and bolts details about what is actually going on. Have EA say pledged cold, hard, defined resources to port all upcoming and lots of old titles to this new platform? What about the studios themselves, are they doing it themselves as an added requirement or are EA parachuting in people over the top to do like a 'console port', can you imagine the resources required if they had to port all major releases, let alone back catalog?
Custom built machines, custom OS, custom virtualisation, custom compression, custom ASICs, custom everything. I reiterate: if I had that much time and investment capital to throw at a problem, I would not be looking to do thin client gaming.
Also what happens w/ each hardware and software change? DirectX12, oh look I have to rewrite my entire stack. Oh look Larrabee or whatever, new drivers, test with every game, etc. Sounds like a management nightmare, magic virtualisation bullet or not.
And crappy last mile will remove half their potential market anyway, colo or not. And how many colos is he going to do? How many custom datacentres are they building? WTF the mind boggles at the scale involved. Why not a million people just buy a million xboxes indeed, what with the cost coming down all the time.
Even if they get game publishers/dev houses on board, what 'servers' will they run this on?
All 'normal' apps run the same on a single socket or a quad cpu monster or in vmware. But these are games designed to use the GPU. All multigpu standards/infrastructure is designed for openGL (not directx) specifically for either GPGPU or renderfarms. We're talking a huge amount of very custom development work. How are they even going to put multiple GPUs in per server? Are they getting custom mobos with 128 PCIE lanes each or something? Running games in their magic vmware variant over FC in their magic esx chassis that can accomodate multiple banks of gaming cards?
The mind boggles, its possible sure but if you got that much money to throw at the problem, why look at a problem in search of a solution? Consoles are perfectly fine and getting cheaper all the time.
"may be working to change the actual structure of the network itself to support the game"
sorry, that phrase alone qualifies as a total fail.
I have a magic network bullet that does not require ripping up all current standards and infrastructure, which I will use to deliver thin client gaming as my first big bang step. riiiiiight
lets talk about the economics and management aspect of all these game 'servers'.... what a total nightmare... what are all publishers going to fine tune custom versions of their games to run on onlive's platforms? games - apps - that are NOT ABLE TO BE VIRTUALISED with current tech - oh wait, I also have a magic virtualisation bullet which I will use.... to deliver thin client gaming
I will then also use my magic video compression bullet.... to deliver thin client gaming
speak for yourself and your linksys mate, I might be an armchair video compression analyst but as for IP networking and enterprise class server infrastructure, I and many on slashdot am far from armchair, and this is so unbelievably difficult/complex that if they did have all their ducks in a row, I would imagine they would have better things to do than do thin client gaming
like, ooh i dunno, revolutionise bing or yahoo's or amazon's backend in a way that can compete with google, heck get bought out by google, oh wait I'll go for a solution in search of a problem.
it just doesn't add up
Exactly, their compression algorithim will have to be an absolute quantum leap in both quality and cpu efficiency i.e. magnitudes faster than anything else on the market.
And that's just the compression algorithm.
The oft hashed latency discussion aside (and I do believe colo is the only way this will be remotely possible), think about the logistics, how many hours have we all wasted getting game XYZ to run properly on hardware/driver/OS config ABC, now they have to do that for all the games they support.... games that cannot be virtualised.... OMG think of the hardware MANAGEMENT alone. (shudders)
and I love the f-cktards who diss the technical sceptics with phrases like 'change the actual structure of the network itself to support the game' (thanks LS, you're an idiot), if they had a way of 'changing the actual structure of the network' - I'm assuming you mean a complete overhaul of the OSI layers whilst remaining backward compatible with current standards and current hardware.... sure I have a magic network bullet and sure I will use it to create gaming thin clients, coz thats the best possible use of this tech I can think of. I also have a video compression magic bullet
How do you have an always on connection for your VOIP w/out 3G?
Or are you treating it like a land line tied to WAPs basically? i.e. if you're not within wifi range you're not contactable.
Older Cisco equipment can function just as well as newer for 95% of lab scenarios. You are very unlikely to be needing to use all the newer features.
Anything that can run IOS 12.3 and is newer than a decade old can do a lot more than you think. We do all our BGP testing on a stack of 2600s and 3600s and never an issue even though in production its 2800s, 3800s etc.
Granted there are features that you do need the newer kit esp when syntax changes (e.g. IP SLA commands, newer netflow commands, class map based QoS to name three off the top of my head) but none of the core routing and switching features/commands has changed much since the introduction of CEF - they all do ACLs, route maps, OSPF, BGP, EIGRP, vlans, spanning tree, rapid spanning tree, IPSEC vpns. I'm speaking from an enterprise POV not a service provider but I'd imagine if you are in a telco environment you wouldn't be lacking gear.
For many minor test scenarios, you can pick a test branch office and use the good old 'reload in XYZ' command to ensure that no matter how badly you stuff it up, everything will bounce and come back (just remember NOT TO COPY RUN START lol).
Then there's the sleight of hand methods:
- always ordering more for projects than you really need. Par for the course really esp as most project managers haven't a clue when it comes to the nuts and bolts of a big cisco order.
- pushing for EOL replacements as early as possible, intentionally conflate end of sale with end of life.
- getting stuff in for projects as early as possible, then you have a month or two to use it as test gear.
- remember that your lab need not mirror reality, scale down as much as possible. e.g. to simulate a pair of 4506 multilayer switch running in VRRP, use a pair of 3560s. Use your CCO login and flash away to your hearts content (I know its breaching licencing but for test scenarios, meh).
Its simple and obvious
There are many societal / peer pressures against being a gamer (for good or bad, I'm not trying into that debate). These pressures are multipled many times for girls.
Hence only the *really* obsessed girls end up saying 'eff it' and gaming away.,
QED
side note: I once dated a gamer chick, ended amicably, but I always suspected she was really a lesbian
Well I'm not in the US lol so I get full choice, but unfortunately the best 3G network is on 850mhz like AT&T which nobody seems to want to support.
The N900 is unfortunately 900/2100mhz. WHich is fine for other carriers, unfortunately their network is slightly crappy compared to the one on 850Mhz, also the slight issue that I work for the one thats 850 and so get staff rates lol. But at least unlike the US you are actually free to move around, no CDMA nonsense all GSM and based on sim cards. I'm actually using a nokia 5800 right now on 2100/900 3G, the carrier in question also does 2100/900 but its noticeably crappier than their 850 network.
unfortunately I'm not so hardcore as to untie myself completey from 3G BUT BUT BUT I do get a work phone for free which means my personal phone is a bit of a luxury (ie keeping my 10 year old number alive, etc.) so I'm very much inclined towards a n900. Doubly so because I've been using nokia maps GPS since it came out and I like and trust it (google maps on droid is all well and good but I'm old fashioned, I want my data ON MY GODDAMNED LOCAL STORAGE)
I own an unlocked 5800, WTF is ovi music/ ovi player?
I don't have comes with music though, I'm guessing its something to do with that?
I just copy over MP3s, update the library and play, no muss no fuss.
I noticed the GPS wierdness re: works like lightning in AGPS mode, takes forever if you don't have a data connection. Though in fairness even EDGE is enough. The amount of data it uses is insignificant compared to say browsing or google maps, I guess I'm not in the US but here in Oz you can get a relatively cheap data pack say 200Mb for 5 bucks extra a month, which is more than enough for you to do light browsing on opera mini and AGPS. Still rip off prices I know.
The worst bit is the 100 dollar per year licence fee for turn by turn on nokia maps, and then its restricted to a region as well lol. I'm a satisfied user, used it for a year on my N82, now coming up to a year on my 5800, but with the new google maps options, also iphone now has tomtom, I wouldn't mind a shiny new n900, choices choices choices. If I plunk down another 100 thats me tied to nokia maps for another year....
Better than skype, try fring.
Integrates all your VOIP (skype, any SIP provider, gtalk ) and IM into one single app that can use wifi or 3G.
Nothing better than switching into fring to make an overseas SIP call whenever you are in wifi range.
It matters because of the google sauce.
On a serious note, the integration of google services is second to none, and a lot of people live pretty much on google platforms (reader, mail, etc.) . The theory is that down the track there will be lots more apps eventually than symbian or winmo. But they're not doing too well on that front by all accounts as the iphone app store is steamrollering the competition and drawing all the developer efforts.
The new turn by turn (Free) on Android 2.0 is pretty slick too, though they can pry my trusted Nokia Maps out of my cold dead hands (even if I am paying for the privilege I do like to have the maps stored locally).
And as for hackable, its not actually that open if you check it out, I'm not a dev but the linux devs I know all shun android as 'faux open source', you'll have to goog the details yourself (no pun intended).
The new Nokia Maemo is the truly linux hacker friendly OS, now that is an exciting prospect (god damn you nokia release a 850Mhz 3G model pls)
US mobile carriers strangling development and wallowing in monopoly rent behaviour. Our next story: scientists believe that dogs like sniffing crotches
Seriously its so obvious that handing control to the locked down US carrier model will nerf any advantages Android provides as a common platform, and even more so in contrast to the iphone which is locked down by a single authority for better or worse. Fortunately, like linus and the linux kernel, the single authority does a pretty good job of it. Whereas with Android its like a open source hell (without the open source), every carrier is basically doing their own fork and then a pretty p1ss poor job of it in many cases.
The sooner someone comes along to provide a viable mainstream alternative that the US public will embrace, the better. Everywhere else in the world the concept of an unlocked phone and the ability to move between carriers, heck even countries, is a given. The problem is that joe public sees stuffed up android phone from Verizon (or whoever) and blame android, not verizon.
well actually I reckon it is.
my phone can output 640x480 no problems. So can my psp. a laptop can't even do full screen standard def?
Yes I know its fine in divx or xvid or even x264 but to average joe the issues of adobe flash vs other codecs/containers/decoders whatever is moot, and flash is THE only real option for online video these days (precisely because most people can't configure their codecs/players etc.). I daresay many
is that full screen flash + GMA950 + intel linux driver + crappy adobe linux flash = FAIL
aside from that, Ubuntu Netbook Remix is mighty impressive,
Unlike Vista it doesn't sit there and grind the hard drive for no discernable reason for ages. That in itself is good enough for me! (and a sad indictment of vista)
Yes yes turned off prefetch, indexing etc.
www.showmypc.com
no install, download and run one file so easy to talk them through.
free too!
I use it all the time and not having to actually install or configure anything is a killer feature. The only situation where this fails is if the user doesn't have admin rights as it needs to run a SSH server (I noticed this on some corporate builds).
Oh this is assuming its wintel of course. If its linux then they can probably handle themselves and if its OSX then it wouldn't break ;)
I'm still not getting all this PVR love. Esp as a lot of it comes from US posters, who have their lovely unlimited (or nearly unlimited) download caps.
Here is backward Oz, where most people live with 20-30 gigs a month, we download everything and nobody gives a rats --- about PVR.
Your paid off the house middle age types buy the officially sanctioned 'tivo' equivalent that is locked down by the provider. Everyone else downloads everything and / or gets it off the standard morning pass-the-usb-drive around ritual @ work.
A friend of mine - who is a linux/java dev full time - runs a myth box. He has wasted far too much of his life (his words not mine) debugging the POS, spent all of last saturday trying to figure out a timing related issue whereby the audio and video goes out of sync on dvds, he reckons that the issue is totally random and not consistently reproducible e.g. patching a simple debug output affected the threading enough so that it fixed it on two of his test machines, but not on others. People working on the issue have reported varying degrees of the same bug. This issue is 6 months old. Yes, dvd playback is borked. Of course the simple solution would be to call mplayer instead but then he would have to manually reconfigure LIRC for mplayer, and so forth. The amount of bugs and issues he mentions to me on a monthly basis sounds nothing short of excruciating, esp. combined with linux graphics driver issues. And this is a guy who runs a custom compiled OS on his workstation (yes its not a distro, he compiles everything from source) and he struggles with myth.
I tried to get myth running on my old media center - I'm no dev or expert but I have been running fedora on my home 'server' since the Fedora Core 3 days, I test drive each new ubuntu and fedora release, I run a 'web appliance' w/ LAMP serving torrentflux-b4rt and ampache, squid, privoxy, ssh gateway so I am far from a newbie. After a wasted weekend - and yes all my hardware was allegedly compatible - I gave up, I didn't even get to the halfway mark so to speak.
Meanwhilst, Bill's dogshite of an OS grinds the HDD like crazy and sometimes wakes from sleep for no reason but god damn the media center bit just works and I never have to worry about it. Stick mediabrowser plugin on it for a jaw dropping, convince-nontechie-friends-they-NEED-a-mediacenter effect. I feel nauseated for advocating a wintel solution but in this case its just better than the alternatives (including appletv).
Hosted a L4D server fine w/ a Pentium M 1.6Ghz laptop / 512Mb RAM, which was also running squid+privoxy caching, and a web-ui bittorrent/usenet downloading facility (torrentflux-b4rt to be precise - a php frontend calling transmissioncli and nzbperl and parsing the output back to web via the php scripts).
Having said that, with buddies in the same city and with a fast 2Mb upstream connection (ADSL2+ w/ AnnexM) and v low pings (lower than 20ms) between us via command line, they were getting ~70ms latency IN GAME which corresponds with what you said. Even when CPU usage was well below 50-60%. Not sure why the latency was there but I suspect it was not to do with the networking infrastructure since CLI pings from my router to my friends' router were consistently well below that.
Mate if you can't port forward / open firewall ports to get borderlands to work, then how are you getting any other port forwarding requirements to work for anything else?
took me less than 5 minutes and most of that was spent in notepad cutting and pasting lines out of access lists (in addition to static NAT mappings, I am running a CBAC firewall so I need to open that up in my router as well), for a typical point and click home router gui I can't see how it could have been difficult. Esp if you have a DMZ option. Did you remember to open up your PC's firewall as well?
Agreed though that for non technical gamers its a no-no, and explains why you can't join 3 out of 4 servers visible. I just start a game labelled 'ports open' myself and people flock to it instantly, I get 0 ping, it works for me... but damn I wish it was steam and had a dedicated server (steam + dedicated left4dead server = good times)
Math is here
3 games @ 6 gigabytes each = 18 gig
3 720p mkvs @ 5gigabytes each = 15 gig
3 seasons at xvid = 12 gigs
total = 45 gigs, leaving 15 gigs for browsing and mp3s. Not great but more than adequate.
And if you don't do hidef then its much more than adequate
Either you are intravenously hooked up to electronic equipment (and need to get out a bit more, even by slashdot standards or you have waaaaay overestimated your consumption. )
Granted where I am quotas are standard so we're used to it but I have no problems living under a 60Gbyte cap. It lets me download two-three full games, ditto in HD movies, more SDTV movies, a few seasons of TV and more music than I can shake a stick at, and still have enough left over for general browsing and VPN to work. Oh and hosting a left4dead server.
How do you actually watch the 200 gigabytes worth of TV you download?!!
You've also got an allergy to engineering reality.
POPULATION DENSITY
Sure there is a lot of telco BS in the mix but the bottom line is that population density in some places makes it not ECONOMICALLY viable . Studies for Australia's proposed FTTH have come up with rough costings of $215AUD (thats nearly 200 USD) per household assuming uptake rate of 80%.
Then again never let the facts get in the way of a semi-geek high horse. 'just upgrade the damn network' LOL