🚀 go-pugleaf

Rin Stowleigh <rstow...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the entrails
of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:

>On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:49:55 -0500, Xocyll <Xoc...@kingston.net>
>wrote:
>
>>Rin Stowleigh <rstow...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the entrails
>>of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:
>>
>>>On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 04:47:07 -0500, Xocyll <Xoc...@kingston.net>
>>>wrote:
>>>
>>>>Rin Stowleigh <rstow...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the entrails
>>>>of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:
>>>>
>>>>>On Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:39:04 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
>>>>><spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>On Wed, 20 Mar 2013 02:54:32 +0400, "Andrew Rybenkov"
>>>>>><aryb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>including DLCs till 26 march.
>>>>>>>(Not sure if this Russia only or everywhere.)
>>>>>>
>>>>>>There's a "player's appreciation sale" (More than 200 titles up to 70%
>>>>>>off!) here in 'merica.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Looks like EA is in full spin, trying to wash the mud off their
>>>>>>repuation after the SimCity fiasco.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>"Look guys, we care about you! Save money on our next games!"
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Of course, myself, I'd rather they just FIX the games I've already
>>>>>>purchased but that costs EA money. New purchases, even at discounted
>>>>>>prices, counts as income; fixing their lemons counts as expenditures. 
>>>>>
>>>>>I don't have a problem with quick-fix damage control tactics like
>>>>>this.  It only takes one douchebag within a company, team or project
>>>>>mgmt level to cause something like the SimCity fiasco, and there are
>>>>>times when, for every one of those guys, you have 20 people who never
>>>>>agreed to the decision and would like to make things right.
>>>>>
>>>>>So, if the discount can benefit some people until the bigger problem
>>>>>gets worked out (not just the online requirement for SimCity, but the
>>>>>larger task of getting some bad eggs out of management), then I say
>>>>>fair enough.
>>>>>
>>>>>>Anyway, I'm never purchasing anything through Origin directly. It's
>>>>>>bad enough if I buy retail and the damn software is installed on my
>>>>>>machine anyway...
>>>>>
>>>>>Never say never, at the rate things are going, there may come a time
>>>>>when optical drives and PCs are no longer a standard combination, or
>>>>>when game companies no longer burn to physical media.
>>>>>
>>>>>Some say "never" even to that, but its the same crowd that said that
>>>>>about floppy drives in PCs too.  I can't remember the last time I
>>>>>owned a PC with a floppy drive, its been a while.
>>>>
>>>>Yeah but the difference is that floppy drives were superceded by other
>>>>removable writeable storage mediums as storage requirements increased,
>>>>they didn't just vanish.
>>>>
>>>>What real use is 1.44MB of storage these days, just as the low density
>>>>floppy formats faded away to make room for the high density ones, HD
>>>>floppys went away when internal ZIP drives came around with 100MB
>>>>storage, and those went away when CDRs became affordable for home use
>>>>which died in turn when DVDRs got cheap.
>>>>
>>>>As long as people need to store and move data, we'll have DVD burners or
>>>>something with even more storage capacity.
>>>
>>>It's not that I'm proposing there will never be another optical drive
>>>you can buy, I'm sure you'll be able to obtain one 20 years from now.
>>>
>>>It's just that with regard to storing data, the cloud is getting more
>>>momentum and with regard to moving data, big bandwidth is getting more
>>>viable.  When you add those two together and combine them with the
>>>growth of mobile, having a "virtual optical drive" that's in the
>>>cloud, that requires nothing more than authentication but otherwise
>>>follows you everywhere, is a compelling feature for many.
>>
>>The problem with the cloud is that it's someone else's server so it is
>>a) insecure if you want the data to be completely secure and private.
>
>No more so than when it's stored on a local hard drive that is
>connected to the Internet.  Technically it is probably safer.  But
>security risks are inherent to network connectivity.

Dude, how is putting my data on someone else's harddrive connected to
the internet _more_ secure than putting it on my own?
And more importantly since we're talking transportation here and
portable storage, how is some dude's cloud server more hack resistant
than a burned dvd in a case on the shelf in my house?

>Even if stored strictly offline, the data is surely less susceptible
>to hacking and such, but unless you are the owner of  underground
>storage bunkers in multiple locations, and willing to make moving data
>between them in an armored truck a full time job, your data is still
>susceptible to house fires, break ins, floods and similar
>catastrophes, most of which are mitigated by cloud storage.
>
>>b) can go away without warning.
>
>Not really.

Their ISP goes down, and you have no access to your data until it comes
up - when exactly.

How long would a cloud server in New Orleans have been down after that
hurricane?

I don't know about you, but my house is unlikely to be the target of a
terrorist attack, a hurricane, and earthquake, a tornado, a massive
flood, etc - I can't say the same about those cloud facilities, mainly
because I have no friggen idea where they are.

I do know that when security is concerned all the software (and
hardware) security in the world doesn't help a damn bit if someone gets
physical access to the machine.   The cloud machine is in someone else's
facility and all it takes is one disgruntled worker with access to the
server room.

>>c) terms can change without warning.
>>Just look at the Instagram fiasco as people were told facebook was
>>claiming the right to sell the pics that users had uploaded under a
>>different privacy policy.
>
>The privacy policy section in question was redacted such that this was
>no longer the case.

Yeah AFTER the media ran with it after multiple celebrities complained
publicly and pulled out of the service.

Doesn't do you much good if you're a musician for instance and you have
your latest bunch of songs on a cloud server and the owner of it changes
their terms to claim ownership of everything on it.
Facebook didn't have to back down legally, but it would have done
irreparable harm to their reputation if they hadn't.

Brand X cloud service owned by the Chinese through some shell companies,
far less concerned with reputation.

>Plus, an app like Instagram is not a good example of privacy as it
>relates to cloud storage.  Instagram was designed to facilitate
>SHARING OF PHOTOS, and the user realizes that by using it.

Yeah but it also had private accounts which the uploader decided who
could access, and suddenly their stuff was being claimed when it was
never, ever open to the public at large.

>If someone like Microsoft, Amazon, etc. offer secure cloud storage and
>it is billed as such, the very nature of what service is being offered
>is drastically different.

Yeah but the average person who would normally back up their vacation
photos, electronic tax returns etc to DVDR probably isn't going to pay
for a service at business rates when there are loads of free ones out
there.

Sure the businesses will (maybe) but not the individuals who also have
data to back up that may be intensely personal.

>>>Even if that does not appeal to you or me, there is still a criticial
>>>mass tipping point where enough people do want it that it no longer
>>>makes sense to incur the manufacturing cost of publishing on physical
>>>media.
>>
>>Yeah except that vast swathes of the Earth, and therefore all the
>>potential customers that live in those areas don't have broadband
>>capable of transferring gigabytes in a short time.
>>
>>It makes sense if you're in one of the big cities that have ultra
>>bandwidth and your ISP gives unlimited download bandwidth, make no sense
>>at all if you're somewhere with low bandwidth caps and stuck on
>>relatively narrow DSL or even dialup.
>>
>>As long as _everyone_ doesn't have the bandwidth limits YOU enjoy,
>>removing physical media sales hurts them both long and short run.
>
>The type of bandwidth I get to my home today is very different than
>even 10 years ago; bandwidth availability continues to grow.

Yeah, in some places it grows fast, in others, dead slow.

>The last time I looked, the GLOBAL average (not just US) speed was
>something like 2.6Mbps and growing at 25% year over year.  It's true
>that there are still a lot of areas without superfast or cost
>effective broadband, but what will matter most is not how much land in
>acres has coverage, but rather what percentage of the global
>population has coverage.  

The problem is that outside the USA unlimited internet accounts are
either not available or far too expensive for the average person.
Take a game that comes on 2 dvds - that over 8 GB (assuming single sided
DVD not double layer ones.  That could be as much as 20% or more of
someone monthly download cap, and if it's a downloaded game there will
probably be at least one patch available before the person downloads it
(and will be forced to patch.)

>In other words, if the rural areas that have poor coverage constitute
>a minority of the gaming population, and the rest of the world is
>seeing 25% Y-O-Y growth in speed, how do you think that's going to
>impact spending plans for software distribution companies?
>
>They care where the bulk of the paying customers are, not the areas
>where there is one frequent buyer of games for every 3 square miles of
>countryside.

You're forgetting they also sell outside the US, where coverage can be
spotty and metered internet rather than unlimited is the norm.

Might be worth the additional hassles of a digital download if it were
significantly cheaper than the physical media edition, only it never is,
they charge the same price for both.

>I'm sure that for a long time to come, there will be niche services
>available to address rural needs; I don't know if that will amount to
>an increase in rural bandwidth options, or specialty services that
>burn digital downloads to disc and ship them for a premium fee or
>what.  I don't see the remote/rural crowd being excluded from gaming
>any time soon, but it is certainly going to get more difficult for
>them unless their bandwidth picture improves.

Download and ship services already exist, but they aren't going to do
you a lot of good if the game in question requires an always on
connection and insists on downloading huge patches.

Or like some, if installing from the dvd still causes the retarded
install program, which insists on connecting to the server before
installing a damn thing, downloads the whole friggen thing anyway and
ignores the dvd completely.

Remember there's a special set of instructions to _force_ steam to
install from a dvd instead of downloading everything, it won't do it by
default even when you run the install from the dvd.
You'd think there'd be a forced default of run install program from the
dvd, you install from the dvd, because anything else is frankly insane.
But insane is what we got.

Xocyll
-- 
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of 
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably, 
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So 
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr