Zindra or Bust!

Today is the day where adult content starts the migration to the new adult mainland, Zindra.  Basically this is what I understand to be happening.  Land owners who have land considered to be “explicit adult content” (more on that later) will head out to Zindra and pick out a plot of land.  This is what land owners have been doing for the past two weeks since Zindra went online.  They need to pick at least three locations, and submit support tickets to Linden Lab three times (I guess one for each land choice).  Support ticket sumbitions start today, Monday June 29th.

The move will mean land owners will have to completely rebuild from scratch.  They will NOT pickup your land and drop it into the new sim already intact.  People who own full mainland sims MAY be able to get it copied over, but I think they may have to pay a fee.  Also,  the old land location will still be avalible so that you can place signs to redirect visitors to the new location for a while, so everyone and update their landmarks.

Land owners who pay full tier for a full sim, but don’t posess a full sims worth of land will likely NOT be given a full sim on the move. My basis of this isn’t from any announcements from Linden Labs, but just my belief.  I think there are many many land owners who fall into this category, since there isn’t a tier between half sim, and a whole sim.  And the fact there are only about 140 sims available in the new mainland Zindra, so I really don’t think Lindens will do this.  Unless they have added more sims since the last time I saw was in Zindra.

As to the definition of what constitutes “explicit adult content” is any public sex area.  So any place where you’ll find random people having sex in the open, they will have to move. This means that simple nudity (strip clubs, nude beaches, etc) don’t qualify under this.  Shops that sell sex beds, and sex poses balls and animations will not be subject to that either, since they are a place of business (yeah it’s always about the money…)  I’m also under the belief that private homes will not be subject to this, unless your home is also located in a public sex area.  There are some areas that are a sort of mix of both where they have shops, dancer and strippers, and a public sex area somewhere tucked in a corner.  My assumption they will have to move, or remove the public sex area.

This won’t happen over night, it’s expected to take months for this to roll out.  Since they are using support tickets to do all of this, it will obviously take time since land owners will have to wait when their number is called.  No one really knows how this will work out.  But we can assume that these areas will lose a lot of traffic since newbies will no longer be able to easily access adult sims, not with out first setting up payment info, or adult verification.  That might sound simple enough, but a lot of people out side of north America tend to have problems getting this set up.  So most users we hang out with now we might not be able to see them again at adult sims.

Becuase this will likely take months, there’s no real telling when the new adult content rules will be enforced, and any remaining land owners who do have “explicit adult content” will be punished.  I have no idea what they will even do to these users.  Ban them, or delete everything from thier parcel, or even give them the chance to move to Zindra.

There’s also question as to what happens to all the left over land left open.  Will it be subject to auctions by the original land owners (not likely since they were given new land in Zindra) or will it be open for people too buy up in a land rush to be auctioned off later.  Also will there be any left over land in Zindra for users to buy up and then auction off?  I’m also assuming that LL plans to add more sims to the adult mainland over time, since 140 sims isn’t that many.

Also as for private land (estate) land owners, they won’t have to move obvioiusly, but thier sims WILL no longer be maked as (Mature) they will become (Adult) if the land is considered “expliciet adult content.”  This also means that thier land will be subject to content filtering in seach, and users will need to be adult verified, or have payment info in order to get there.  Most of that has already occured with private sims since the new 1.23.4 version of the SL viewer was released a couple weeks ago.

Speaking of the SL viewer, you’re NOT required to use it to access the new “Adult” content.  You still need proper verification/payment info on your account, but you don’t need the new viewer.  All the new viewer does is the content filtering.  Also if you are using the new viewer you need to tell it that you DO want to view and access all content PG, Mature, and Adult.

New SL viewer, and Zindra!

I’m not sure why they did this but they changed a few fundamentals in this viewer that’s bugging me. First of all some of the pie menus have been changed around so you might accidentally choose something else.  Clicking on your avatar and going ‘down’ now activates appearance mode, so if you were clicking on an attachment you won’t accidentally click on “detach.”

Also the mini map compass has black letters and you can barely read it now, so you can’t tell which direction you’re facing now.  Arg!

Of course the big deal about this new viewer is the new adult content filters, and restrictions to the new sim classification of “Adult” (adding to the existing PG, and Mature sims we already have).  Which will lead to the adult content being segregated and moved onto a new mainland.  God knows this will be one big fiasco. Friends are calling this the end of SL, and it won’t last for another year.  I hear this every time LL makes a controvierial announcement, and we are still here.  But it would be nice if LL stopped making stupid choices like this, hopefully there won’t be a need for bonehead announcements after this big one has blown over… assuming it ever does considering how long this might take.

What I don’t get is what is actually making land owners move to the new mainland? It’s not like the Lindens can automatically earmark a parcel as “adult” and force them to move to Zindra.  Land owners who believe they have an adult themed area should submit a support ticket for the move, then wait for the Lindens to call their ticket up and help them move. In fact for the next two weeks the new mainland called “Zindra” will be an open house for users fly out and check out and claim spots.  However you DO have use an avatar with either adult verification or billing info on file/used, however you don’t need to use the new 1.23 viewer.

So apparently there won’t be a landgrab like there usually is when a new mainland opens up, allowing for the Lindens to take care of each landowner that wants to move.But that’s my point, the land owners who WANT to move, there’s was nothing said about being FORCED too. The Lindens like to talk about how no one is ever forced to do anything, like Adult Verification was never “forced” on anyone and back then adult themed land owners weren’t forced to flag thier land as adult.  They had to rely on other residents to submit abuse reports if they see adult themed areas that aren’t properly flagged. And NO ONE ever did that!  Even then it’s not like the Lindens automatically lay down the law, they probably have to get many reports about the same land for them to even care. Which supprised the hell out of me, since there are a lot of evil douchebags in SL who could EASILY abuse this and use thier army of alts to send abuse reports about landowners who didn’t properly flag thier land as “adult.”  I’m sure now the same will hold true for this segregation once people find left-over “adult themed” areas still on the older mainlands.  Probably from landowners who don’t login cept maybe one every six months.

As for Zindra it self, you don’t need to use the new 1.23 viewer to access the new mainland. However you DO need to have payment info on file/used, or be adult verified. All of the “adult” filtering is done at the viewer side of things, so using the older viewer, or alternate viewers aren’t required.

Running Windows 7 RC

Well I downloaded the newest version of Windows 7 (RC) and everything thing is running well.  Some aspects of my hardware I can’t control since APIC drivers don’t exist for Win7, and even the Vista versions don’t work with it. So now my PC runs at stock speeds, and I can’t over clock it (as if I need that) nor underclock; it so i can quite the fans down (it’s noisy!!)

The UI takes some getting used too.  I never used Vista very much at all, I’ve been using XP since forever so this is a big leap for me.  I’m also using the 64bit version of Win7, and while it does “see” all 4GB of RAM I have, it still says only 3.25GB is accessible.  I thought the 64bit version of Windows was supposed to overcome that?!?  I’m running on an Asus PQ5 motherboard and in it’s BIOS has a setting about the PCI remapping memory registers around this limit with having over 3.5GB of RAM.  I’m not sure if I need to enable or disable it.  Either way Win7 still acts as if I’m running 32bit Windows.

Also the product key I’m using is the same one I got when regisreting for the Windows 7 beta back in January.   I was able to get about 5 product keys, and the two I’ve used work fine, and activating windows had no problems.  Also all the product keys work with either 32 or 64 bit versions. Win7 RC will last one year which by then Windows 7 will be out in retail, and I’ll try to pick up a copy of it before my install dies off.  I’m sure I can score a student or OEM version for under $150.

California Special Election

Oh no! The economy is all fucked up, quick lets have an emergency (knee-jerk) election to fix it all!  After all it was just six months ago we had the biggest voter turn out in history! Why not capitalize on that momentum by setting up a bunch of meaningless state propositions and make it seem like the average voter will help!  So can voters fix the state economy?  Hey we were able to ban homosexual marriages in California!  Yes we can!

Prop 1A – Rainy Day Budget Stabilization fund
Increases the size of the states “Rainy Day” fund and requiring “above-average” revenues to be deposited into it, for use during economic downturns. Fiscal Impact: higher state taxes.

This is complete bullshit.  First of all, California’s budget is always in perpetual deficits. Every year in Sacramento they are always late in finalizing a budget, causing state ran institutions to stop running, laying off firemen, police officers, and sending out IOUs as paychecks to state employees. So when they finally do settle on a budget, they add billions of dollars in DEBT!  So how can ANY money be put into this “rainy day” fund when there is never any revenues, let alone “above-average” revenues in the first place?  How is “revenue” defined anyway?

Also when have we not been in a “economic downturn?”  Seems like the whole country has been in an economic downturn since the ’80s.  Sure the economy is really bad now, but it hasn’t been doing well for at least 25 years.  And the fact that Prop 1A will raise taxes is an automatic “NO!” since you can’t TAX your self into economic prosperity.

Prop 1B Education Funding, Payment plan
Requires supplemental payments to local school districts and community collages to off set the budget cuts they did last year.

This sounds good, but they will just cut their budget’s again the next time they hammer out another state budget, and still create an all-time-high state deficit. Vote NO on this, it’s meaningless.

Prop 1C Lottery Modernization Act
Allows state lottery to be modernized to improve it’s performance with increased payouts, improved marketing, and effective management.

At first this seemed like a feeble attempt to revive a dying horse that needs to be shot.  It’s hard to believe that we voted in the state Lottery about 25 years ago and it really hasn’t helped much.  These days we almost forget there is a lottery/lotto anymore.  The only time people give a shit is when the jackpot is huge which hasn’t happened since the ’90s, and lately it’s barely over 15 million.

If this passes it’s supposed to “modernize” the lottery, that started back in the ’80s.  So, does that mean they still using old Commodore 64’s to manage the lottery? What exactly do they need to modernize? I do agree they need to improve marketing since like I said people just don’t care about the lotto/lottery anymore anyway.  Hopefully if the Lottery gets more popular with better marketing, more money will funnel back into our schools, which is something they promised to do since it’s inception.

I’m going to vote yes on this since they are going to “borrow $5million from future lottery profits” so it’s like they borrowing money from themselves. But it’s really just taking more taxpayer money, in hopes the Lottery becomes popular again, and people buy more tickets.  If this fails we won’t be any more worse off than we already are.  If it passes then there’s a chance it can help, as long as whoever is going to work on “improving marketing” does a decent job. Just means we will see more lotto commercials on TV.

Prop 1D Children Services Funding
Temporarily provides greater flexibility in funding to preserve health and human services for young children.

I love it when they say “temporary” since laws pass usually end up lasting forever.  I really don’t see how this is going to help when it states on the ballot that there will be reductions in funding for early childhood development programs, and that some how saves money when for the next 5 years. So kids born after 2014 are shit outta luck?  None of this makes a whole lotta sense, and wording on this also mentions “difficult economy” as if it’s going to remind everyone we are already IN one, so people vote yes.  Fuck it.

Prop 1E Mental Health Funding. Temporary reallocation
Helps balance state budget by amending the mental health services act of 2004. Transfer funds, for 2 years, to pay for mental health services.

This is worded EXACTLY like Prop 1D. It makes no sense, it’s forcing money out from somewhere into both 1D and 1E when we clearly have no money in the first place.  More wording of “difficult economy” to cause knee jerk reactions for YES votes.  Vote no, it’s horseshit.

Prop 1F Elected officials’ salaries preventes pay increases during budget deficit years
Encourages balanced state budgets by preventing elected members of Legislature, state wide constitutional offers, and the governor from receiving a pay raise.

HOT DAMN something that makes complete sense and is written in such away that you can’t possibly get confused as too a double meaning, nor does it seem meaningless.  It’s not like any of our elected state officials NEED a pay raise when they are doing better off than any of their constitutes are doing. Plus they can probably live off thier reelection funds anyway! Since we have had a deficit in our state budget for as long as I can remember, they will never get a raise again.  It would be better if they were getting PAY CUTS, which is probably a $1billion right there that can be used to hire more firemen.  This is a no-brainer YES.

Runes of Magic

Do you like games like World of Warcraft, but don’t want to pay a monthly fee? Want to be able to ride your own mount, with out having to play for months mindlessly grinding to level 50 to get one that rides slow anyway? Want to get your own home to keep your stash and decorate too?  So if you want a WoW type experience on the cheap, try Runes of Magic! I’m already addicted to this game, and I never thought I’d get back into a fantasy style RPG ever again. I still feel that fantasy games are over played and unoriginal, but it has about a half-dozen classes you can try out, as well as being able to play dual classes (once you’re at level 10) so there is a lot of replay value. RoM has only been open to the public since last March, and I don’t know how long it was in beta.  The download for the client is 3.4GB, so start your DLs now and go to bed for the night.

I also found this website that lists out more free MMOs everyone can play. It’s a rather long list but they list Second Life with a ranking of 9, which seems to be thier highest ranking, since there isn’t anything listed with a rank of 10.  There.com wasn’t listed at all, I guess it’s not considered a free MMO, yet it’s about as free as Second Life is.

Gambling could return to SL?

About three years ago a law was passed by the US Congress (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006) which basically killed off legitimate online gambling (didn’t stop illegitimate gambling), leaving us with online poker sites that are more like training and game playing than actual gambling. Around this time was when Linden Labs banned casino games from Second Life.

According to this article in the New York Times talks about a possible repeal of this law.  Because of the global economic problems going on right now, many governments (U.S. included) are considering legalizing gambling as a new source of revenue , by simply taxing it.  This could open up casino gambling in SL if something like this goes though, especially of other countries also change their polices.  I had assumed that the reason LL banned casino games from SL, was due to pressure from laws of different countries. Since Second Life has a world wide user base, LL often succumbs to the laws around the world; having to fit to the lowest common denominator of the law.

But laws never stopped so-called “off shore gambling” web site who are located in international waters and don’t reside in any country and are basically lawless, and yield millions of dollars for these organizations.  Even in legalized gambling, as is with Indian casinos, nets them millions of dollars in revenue, even for the local state governments they are located in.

But this idea might not be a good idea.  The state of Nevada, where casino gambling is legal state wide, where anyone can set up a slot-mashine at thier stabishment, isn’t doing so well.  An article at the Review Journal that Nevada’s economy took a huge nose dive in January 2007 and is dead LAST. Plus it couldn’t have possibly gotten any better two years later.  Everyone is feeling the economic crunch where every dollar counts, so people aren’t willing to gamble thier money away unless you’re a compuslive gambler.

Linden Censorship, and segergation.

There’s a whole lotta chatter and paranoia about the proposed changes with adult content in SL.  Linden Labs seems to want to ignore the obvious fact that the #1 reason why people use SL is for the adult content with little to no restrictions to newbies accessing that.  Where esle can you play interactive virtual porn, and pay little to nothing in doing so?  It’s often this sort of content that encourages new users to become paying members.  Most other places (say uthereverse) require subscriptions to access the adult content with out so much as a sample. Oh and lets not forget the fact that SL is a cross platform MMO where as most other MMO’s are windows-only.

The thing that I really love is the PR spin the Lindens give on this.  Taken from the Adult-oriented content controls FAQ, via SL’s knowledge base, they answer some common, yet very weak, questions:

Is this something that Second Life users have asked for?
Yes. Numerous Residents, ranging from adult-content vendors to educators, have requested that we provide additional tools to enable them to tailor their inworld experiences and make them more predictable.

Horseshit. This is something the Lindens basically sprang up on us over night. If we, the users, have been asking for this then we would have been expecting this years ago. After the initial controversy of Adult Verification, that became a huge joke, that should have been our first hint to something grander since it was clearly a step towards more restrictions and lack of freedom. However they waited a good two years or so after the Adult Verification fiasco settled down before they announced this new segregation proposal.

How does this move prevent minors from entering Second Life or accessing content?
As part of this initiative, we will require Residents who access adult content (or view Adult search results) to go through an account verification process — either being verified through our age verification provider, or have a verified payment method.

Then what was the entire point of Adult Verification, since one of their main mantra (which I agreed with) was that having billing info dosen’t mean the user as over 18 years old. Any person of any age can get a bank account in their name, and use that to pay into Second Life. Credit cards companies and banks aren’t in the business of checking a customers age since it’s not against the law for a minor to have them.  While these institutions likely hold DOB information in their databases, but it’s not public record. So it’s not any one else’s business to access that information, and in most cases it’s illegal for them to do so.

Doesn’t this move go against the free spirit of Second Life and the internet?
No. From its inception, Second Life has been an open place, where Residents are free to explore a wide diversity of creative pursuits. This openness has fostered a tremendous amount of amazing content inworld and helped make Second Life what it is today. We are committed to preserving that openness while at the same time, ensuring that Residents can engage in Second Life in the manner most suited to their needs and interests.

This is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard.  I know that LL has the best intentions in this regard if given the choice they would HAVE let Second Life become the wild-wild-west of the internet.  They would have allowed casino gambling to continue, they wouldn’t have bothered with adult verification, and all this extra bullshit that make it sounds like The Man is coming down on us.

But the reality is that you can’t have security, and “protect the kids” with out censorship, restrictions, and segregation.  You end up retarding creativity, freedom, and choice. The Lindens know this but they don’t want to admit it publicly, since the user base may quit en masse. Thus causing a huge portion of their economy to vanish over night. So they are trying to spin this as if nothing will change.

Is LL trying to deemphasize the community so it can focus more on the enterprise market?
Not at all. There are many communities in Second Life — from educators, artists, entrepreneurs, gamers, enterprise users, and many more, including those interested in adult content — and there’s room for all of them in Second Life, just as there is on the Internet at large and in the real world.

WHAT? The reason why LL is making these policy changes is because THEY CAN! The reason why there’s “room for this on the internet at large and the real world” is because no one has that much control over them, DUH!  At least not as much control that Linden Labs has with Second Life.  This analogy is ridiculous and slaps in the face of common sense.  Whoever wrote that is a fucking idiot.

How will this program help attract new users?
It will make Second Life more attractive to new users by making it more customizable and easier to search for relevant content, whether adult or non-adult.

See this is where LL wants to ignore the reason why people login to Second Life in the first place.  FOR THE ADULT CONTENT. Yes it’s not like the adult content will be removed from SL (but a lot of it will be LOST due to this change), but the moment new users find out they are RESTRICTED from the content they are seeking, and probably have to spend money doing so, then why bother logging in again?

I do believe the search engine in SL has a LOT to be desired, but that’s because users simply abuse how the search engine works to get hits on searches (using discriptions filled with common meta key-words, but no acctual description).  Linden Labs isn’t talking about making it easier/customization to find what users are looking for they are going to restrict search results based on you being verified or not.

The fact the news of this is going around, will likely cause users to NOT BOTHER starting accounts on SL if they are going to be restricted from the content they are seeking.  If users want to explore a PG world, they can already check out www.there.com.

XsteetSL to use SL logins

XstreetSL has announced they will be using login information from Second Life. I think this is great. I never got an account set up proper at Xstreet. I’ve tried to set one up, but it kept saying my email address was already being used, yet my login info didn’t work. Asking for a password reset dosen’t work since since it asks for your login name, and not your e-mail address. So hopefully when this goes into effect, I won’t need to worry about this anymore.

Now there are some obvious concerns about this, mainly security.  If XstreetSL was still a separate entity; then yes I would be quite alarmed that all of a sudden my account information on Second Life would be magically migrated over to some 3rd party web site. But remember kids, Linden Labs acquired XstreetSL not to long ago, so this isn’t a big deal, so our private information is still being kept by a single entity. I would only question is to exactly how they are doing this, since I don’t believe the two sites are even remotely compatible.  They won’t be changing how SL works, so they will have to change how XstreetSL works. It’s not likely they manually copy and convert login info from the 6million+ users accounts that already exist, as well as the thouands of new ones that are created every day.  So the paranoia about this I think isn’t neccessary.

Also this is a step forward in integrating all the services that Linden Labs has, with out requiring separate login accounts for SL it self, it’s web page, JIRA, SL Blog, and now XStreet.  I’m also going to assume that XStreet will eventually lose their name, and just be integrated as appart of Second Life, using the built-in web browser in the viewer; a lot like how shopping is done at There.com.

There are other high risk security issues that Second life still needs to address:

No secure trading function
SL has no way of guaranteeing that when you buy or trade something, you’ll actually get something in return. Short of using scripted vendos, if you’re dealing with another user directly, you’re giving your complete trust that the other person wont just skip out on you after you paid to buy someting from them.  Though the direct pay function still needs to exist, otherwise you couldn’t pay into vendos, or give others gifts. There.com has had a secure trading function for many years, where you’ll see all the details of the item(s) you’re giving, as well as receving, with TWO confirmations before the exchange takes place. SL has yet to have anything like this, so users have to file fraud abuse reports to LL if a deal goes bad.  If LL implemented this, it  will cut down a lot of their abuse reports of fraud and less work load for Linden employees who can spend time fixing something else.

Remember password
This is a stupid thing to have.  If a user can’t remember thier password then they are SOL.  Functions like these just makes user lazy-minded anyway.  I’ve hand many occrances where I’ll meet someone new, have a good time chatting with them.  Then the next day I see them again and they are like a completely diffrent person. Often abusive, insulting, or just plain stupid. This is because it WAS A diffrent person. This user kept “remember password” and so thier roommate, BF/GF/Spouse, sibling logged in as them.  Linden Labs is always talking about password security, how it’s a violation of TOS to give your password to anyone else, and you should change it on a regular bassis.  Yet they have this “remember password” function that opens up a whole new avenew of insecurity; it ought to be removed completely, or at least tucked away deep inside prefrences, and set OFF by defualt.

Those are the top two things that have bugged me for years.. i know there’s more but nothing i can recall right now. I’ll add more to this list later.

Newer DLC for Fallout 3

I got the Pitt, and it still hasn’t raised the level 20 cap!  ARG!  How am I supposed to check out the new perks if i can’t level anymore?  I really don’t want to re-play the whole game yet again. Otherwise it’s kina cool so far, though it does have a tendency to lock up my 360 from time to time.  There was a system/dashboard update on April 1st, which is said to fix lockup issues with certain game titles; I guess that exlcudes Fallout 3 DLCs.

I love my 360, but one of the biggest gripes I have is how slow it is at rezing textures.  Ever load up a map on Gears2, and everything looks flat and dull. But after about 10 seconds it clears up sharp. and and it looks much better as if you had just put on your glasses?  For some reason the 360 loads textures so slow, and this occurs on many games not just Gears.  It’s like how textures and objects rez slow on Second Life when you login, or teleport somewhere.  But that’s only because everything has to download to you for it to rez on Second Life; it should be nearly instantaneous when all the assets of the virtual enviroment you’re in is all local.  Maybe if I copied Gears2 to my hard drive it would help?  As if I had room anymore.  Maybe this is why Gears 2 has these all of these stupid 5 second count down before the game starts, giving your 360 some time to load those texture up.  Often it still needs yet another 5 seconds.

OnLive is a pipedream

I don’t even like the concept that Steve Perlman is trying to showoff at the GDC, but more on that later.  In case you don’t know what OnLive is, it’s a new video game service where you don’t need to use real expensive hardware to play your games. Rather than buying an expensive console to render all your pretty eyecandy on screen, OnLive’s servers will do all the heavy CPU/GPU number crunching for you, and simply send you a compressed video feed. All with little to no lag, and HD quality, and it will seem like you’re playing the game on your own PC/Console.

First, everyone who are experts at video compression/encoding are crying “bullshit” about this concept.  OnLive talks about how it has massive super server farms that will handle all of this, so that it can be done in as little as one millisecond from the moment the player press a button on the controller, to when you see those results on screen.  Having a gigantic rendering server farm to do all of this sounds fine and dandy, but how is a small cigarette box sized device going to be decode that video feed that quickly if it took huge server farm to encode it in the first place?

All encoding (video and audio) needs extra buffer time to compress sufficiently to fit though the pipes, before it can start displaying it.  Your mp3 player does this, your DVR does this, your DVD and BluRay player does this.  So how exactly is this supposed to work properly on a “live” video game where things are changing every fraction of a second? A video game isn’t predictable, unlike a pre-recorded video where it’s already known what the next frame will show.  When you run a video codec on a video file, it takes into consideration what the next frame will show in relation to the previous frame, as sometimes many frames in advanced.  Often video codecs only change a small portion of the screen at any given time, since a scene’s background may not change.   Even with live TV broadcast that isn’t pre-recorded still requires several seconds of delay time before it even hits viewers TV screens (not to mention the extra time they put in for censoring)   Also the encoded sound is also another issue that plays into this latency/real-time stuff, and trying to sync audio and video in real time all in one millisecond is mind numbing, considering it’s probably rendering 30 frames a second, minimum 24fps (movie film speed).

What you see during a video game isn’t predictable. The player has control of the so-called “camera” and the player is the director.  This means the codec will have to render the entire screen (full screen) many many times as the player looks around and changes the view.  Or when the player gets shot at, monsters jump at the player, explosions go off, etc. etc.  The codec will not know what the next frame will be to optimize and anticipate the compression method to use next. If it tries to anticipate the next frame, it might be wrong (or show on-screen artifacts) and start a whole new full screen rendering, which will defiantly add to the magical 1ms delay.

This might work if the player just stands in one position the whole time, but that makes a boring game.  The only way this can really work is if they did little to no actual compression of the video, so there is no depredation to the video quality.  After all OnLive states you need at LEAST a 1.5mbit Internet connection to just get standard definition video quality, and 5+mbit connection for 720p HD. So this means we will have to LOSE video quality just to play our games that we are already playing at 1080p.  If they are using very little compression, it makes sense to me since that reportedly OnLive has been in  “stealth” development for seven years.  Seven years ago we BARELY had enough broadband penetration to stream chunky Youtube videos.  So OnLive was probably just sitting on thier hands all this time waiting for ISPs to deliver faster broadband.

<sarcasm>
Ya know I’ve been working on cold fusion for the past 15 years, I’m just waiting on someone else to improve a different technology so my work can be closer to completion.
</sarcasm>

Now back to the real issue I have with this concept.  This will remove the need to buy games on any media.  OnLive is all about a subscription service you pay for (perhaps by the hour) and play your games. It’s not just multiplayer games, but also single player games.  I just don’t like the idea that I’m paying someone a fee for every hour I play a single player game like BioShock, or Fallout 3.  I can understand that for a multiplayer game, but not when it’s a single player game, and I shouldn’t have to be pressured to finish my game because my time is about to run out.  I should be able to buy a game for $50 and play it any time, and as often as I like with out incurring more fees on a game that I already consider to be overpriced.  I also just don’t like being dependent on my ISP, because if my ISP is having a bad day and goes offline, I can’t play any of my games, including SINGLE PLAYER games.

I think the real reason Steve Perlman is promoting this is the fact that if this concept works, video game piracy would disappear.  As a matter of fact so would the pre-used game market would die (like GameStop), since you will not purchase the games on discs anymore.  So you know gaming companies, and publishers will want to endorse, and pump in HUGE amounts of capital into OnLive to get it off the ground, and promote the hell out of it.

Afterall this was introduced at GDC, which is only for game DEVELOPERS, not common game consumers like us.  I’m quite sure he’s hyping this to entice investments from rich people, and game developers and publishers who still have deep pockets even in this economic climate. Feeding promises to game publishers with something that could end piracy, and aftermarket resales of games.  In this economic climate, this could be just an opertunity for Perlman to get a ton of capital he can then sit on, while waiting for ISPs to improve broadband speeds to home users in another seven years.  Sure, by then we will all have 10terabit internet connections, and then this concept will work!

I hope this dosen’t work.  Common sense tells me it won’t, even if broadband became so fast and ubiqudus in the future, it still dosen’t seem right. It’s like big brother watching over everything, and you have no privacy, and closing out indie game developers from ever getting into this market.

I just don’t want to be a gamer slave to OnLive.