OnLive... streaming games w/o hardware

[Nikolai]

2. Bandwidth. 5Mbps for HD gaming, this is about 2.2GB of total bandwidth per hour of use. Not to mention any network activity if it's multiplayer game. Bandwidth caps are cropping up everywhere, the highest for Rogers (the largest ISP in Canada) is 95GB per month, but most people have 50GB caps here. That is ridiculously expensive.

This is no problem. 5 Mbps is not much, 6 Mbps ADSL cost ~50-60 USD per month with these days' exhange rates, if you have access to fibre, you can get 10 Mbps for the same price. And download limits are so 2001. Seriously, what kind of hole are you living in?

[snoopy369]

Well, if you include both (user-to-server) lag and (server to server) lag, the lag will be at LEAST as bad, and potentially 2x as bad.

Right now you have lag just once - in a 100ms ping (pretending that is equivalent to lag), you are delayed 100ms in receiving actions from your friend. He does something, you find out 100ms later. Right?

Now, once he does something, it has the him-to-server lag (say 80ms), then the server to server lag (minimal), then the server-to-you lag (on average, the same as his lag; say 80ms). Two lags for every action, not just one, and probably more in total (in this case, 160ms). Of course, if these servers were the same servers you would normally pass traffic through, it would just be one half of the lag and the other half, but that is not going to be the case...

I was noting that the server-to-server portion of the lag would be minimal [at the cost of increased user-to-computer/server lag].

[Kuciwalker]

Well, if you include both (user-to-server) lag and (server to server) lag, the lag will be at LEAST as bad, and potentially 2x as bad.

Except that given decent dataserver placement, it probably won't be far out of the path the packets would have to go anyway.

[snoopy369]

If they only have four of them, that's definitely not going to be the case. Heck, it could increase the lag to beyond 2x, if I'm playing with another person in Chicago, say, even on Comcast as well, and they pick NY, Dallas, LA, and Miami for their four locations [say].

[Q Classic]

Penny Arcade is once again spot-on.

[Wiglaf]

TECH FORUM TAKIN IT :ANGRY: :agnry:

[The Mad Monk]

all hail the downfall of capitalism

You really think slick sales pitches are limited to capitalism?

People will always find ways to game the system, regardless of the system.

All Hail Potemkin Village!

[Q Classic]

I made the mistake of reading some of the comments in the original article. This one by Motorola29 in particular hurts my brain.

Welcome to the apocalypse of gaming. Cripple the economy even more by shutting down any competition between sony, microsoft, and nintendo. Investing money into something you can't touch is a mistake.

I'm glad to see our society is moving towards socialism. Now we can't even play a game anymore without some major corporation playing big brother and tracking everything we buy, sell, watch, and how we pay for it.

I hope this thing fails for the sake of the game industry.

WTF? The first paragraph kills, because this thing won't shut down competition between the three, and because people have been investing in Google for a while now relatively happily.

The second bit suggests to me the guy doesn't know WTF socialism is. A corporation finding out how people purchase doesn't equate to public/state-ownership of capital and production.

So many ****ing people misusing "socialism" because they're too ****ing dim to know what it really is and thus apply it to everything because the ****ing talking Republican heads are using it.

[snoopy369]

GD**** SOCIALIST CORPORATIONS

[Wiglaf]

So many ****ing people misusing "socialism" because they're too ****ing dim to know what it really is and thus apply it to everything because the ****ing talking Republican heads are using it.

Almost as annoying as people who blame Republicans for everything

[DaShi]

But republicans are responsible for everything.

[Unimatrix11]

Well, it can be argued, that what is known as socialism (e.g. most of its practical RL-instances we saw), boiled down to state-capitalism, in which, at the business end of things, the state acted as one big corparation. The USSR still produced consumer-GOODS, meaning things meant to be sold, meaning people working for money, meaning alienated work, in the Marxian sense. In the end, it did not even attempt to change that anymore - not even theoretically, i´d guess.

I am not 100% sure, but i do believe that money was generated pretty much exactly the same way in the east as in the west as well (via credit with interest), resulting in the same need for constant growth. And, as in capitalism, being in paid labor was not really optional, but obligatory. As in the west, a lot of work was done merely to keep people ´employed´, though ´lack of work´ had different symptoms (people loathing at their job instead of ´unemployment´).

Robert Kurz shows very well in his ´black book of capitalism´, that the modern form of socialism, as well as social-democracy are both children of the liberal mindset, and thus never quite succeeded in escaping its categories (like ´employment´, productivity precieved as universal good regardless of what is being produced, work being desireable, naturally percieved legitimation of workless income, ´laws of the market´ percieved as unchangeable ´natural´ laws, subordination to ´the machine´ of oneself and the at least latent willingness to use force to submit others to it as well, male dominance in society and so on).

[Asher]

Translation: OnLive is commie.

[FrostyBoy]

Just so you know Singapore offers 25mbps last time I checked. www.starhub.com I havnt checked today, so I might get attacked for posting this

[Asher]

The bandwidth itself is not the issue. In fact, 5Mbps is a bit low. Even in 100% ideal settings at the demo site, connected via LAN and not on the internet and with only 1 person playing on the whole server at any given time, the press noticed it was noticably blocky. You need more than 5Mbps to do "good quality" HD, especially if you're doing the encoding with purported "1ms frame latency" (as opposed to the 700-800ms average with h264), and without any b-frames.