Remote computing almost never makes sense. Budgeting for continued access inevitably costs enough to buy something local - less powerful, but powerful enough. One year university supercomputers could run multiplayer first-person dungeon crawlers. The next year, so could an Apple II. (Christ, $1300 at launch? It did not do much more than the $600 TRS-80 and C64. The Apple I was only $666. Meanwhile a $150 Atari was better at action titles anyway.)
When networks advance faster than computing, there’s glimpses of viability. Maybe there was a brief window where machines that struggled with Doom could have streamed Quake over dial-up… at 28.8 kbps… in RealPlayer quality… while paying by the minute for the phone call. Or maybe your first cable modem could have delivered Far Cry in standard-def MPEG2, right between Halo 2 and the $300 launch of the 360, while Half-Life 2 ran on any damn thing.
Nowadays your phone runs Unreal 5 games. What else were you gonna stream games on? If you have a desktop, it’s probably for gaming. Set-top boxes keep Ouya-ing themselves, trying to become “mini-consoles” that cost too much, run poorly, and stop getting updates. Minimalist laptops like Chromebook find themselves abandoned, even though the entire fucking pitch was an everlasting dumb terminal for the internet. The only place cloud gaming almost works is for laptops, and really only work laptops, because otherwise-- buy a Steam Deck. You’re better off carrying a keyboard for normal desk use than a controller for gaming on the subway.
Back in the ole days network computing made sense simply because of availability.
It took the industry decades to supply physical hardware, and even this is debatable considering the god forsaken prices we’ve seen over the past 7 years.
The industry is struggling to meet every level of pyramid that is computing need.
The other thing is remote gaming is ideally something purposely aimed at the jet setting never home thin and light packed warrior. Shit for the
If you worked from home it makes no sense to not buy your own hardware. Although at today’s insanely inflated prices it’s not making much sense.
“The ole days” meaning 1963 to 1976. Anywhere after that, if you had a monitor and a modem, you might as well buy a microcomputer. Uncontested access, total control, boots into an environment to write your own programs. Only the French made a networked alternative worthwhile - and frankly even Minitel machines should’ve had homebrew for poker or whatever.
Trends over the last decade are general inflation not being matched by any serious growth in wages. Trends over the last year are just grifters with an infinite money glitch buying literally all hardware so the robot can stare at pirated movies. I’m not the sort of person to insist capitalism never works, but this is definitely capitalism not working.
Remote computing makes sense from an environmental perspective. There would be a drastic reduction in e-waste if people were using zero clients instead of desktops.
I don’t know how well that holds. I’m not under the impression that much cloud hardware can be it is reused. Also thin clients tend to have short lifecycles
I said zero client, not thin client. A zero client is basically just a device that connects to remote computing, not unlike a dedicated streaming device.
That’s a thin client. You can rebrand it however many times you want. I still see em in the ewaste. At the end of the day you can’t remove the computing requirements of running a network stack, a crypto stack, a compression stack, HID, and frame and audio buffering.
Cloud gaming isn’t real.
Remote computing almost never makes sense. Budgeting for continued access inevitably costs enough to buy something local - less powerful, but powerful enough. One year university supercomputers could run multiplayer first-person dungeon crawlers. The next year, so could an Apple II. (Christ, $1300 at launch? It did not do much more than the $600 TRS-80 and C64. The Apple I was only $666. Meanwhile a $150 Atari was better at action titles anyway.)
When networks advance faster than computing, there’s glimpses of viability. Maybe there was a brief window where machines that struggled with Doom could have streamed Quake over dial-up… at 28.8 kbps… in RealPlayer quality… while paying by the minute for the phone call. Or maybe your first cable modem could have delivered Far Cry in standard-def MPEG2, right between Halo 2 and the $300 launch of the 360, while Half-Life 2 ran on any damn thing.
Nowadays your phone runs Unreal 5 games. What else were you gonna stream games on? If you have a desktop, it’s probably for gaming. Set-top boxes keep Ouya-ing themselves, trying to become “mini-consoles” that cost too much, run poorly, and stop getting updates. Minimalist laptops like Chromebook find themselves abandoned, even though the entire fucking pitch was an everlasting dumb terminal for the internet. The only place cloud gaming almost works is for laptops, and really only work laptops, because otherwise-- buy a Steam Deck. You’re better off carrying a keyboard for normal desk use than a controller for gaming on the subway.
Back in the ole days network computing made sense simply because of availability.
It took the industry decades to supply physical hardware, and even this is debatable considering the god forsaken prices we’ve seen over the past 7 years.
The industry is struggling to meet every level of pyramid that is computing need.
The other thing is remote gaming is ideally something purposely aimed at the jet setting never home thin and light packed warrior. Shit for the
If you worked from home it makes no sense to not buy your own hardware. Although at today’s insanely inflated prices it’s not making much sense.
“The ole days” meaning 1963 to 1976. Anywhere after that, if you had a monitor and a modem, you might as well buy a microcomputer. Uncontested access, total control, boots into an environment to write your own programs. Only the French made a networked alternative worthwhile - and frankly even Minitel machines should’ve had homebrew for poker or whatever.
Trends over the last decade are general inflation not being matched by any serious growth in wages. Trends over the last year are just grifters with an infinite money glitch buying literally all hardware so the robot can stare at pirated movies. I’m not the sort of person to insist capitalism never works, but this is definitely capitalism not working.
Remote computing makes sense from an environmental perspective. There would be a drastic reduction in e-waste if people were using zero clients instead of desktops.
I don’t know how well that holds. I’m not under the impression that much cloud hardware can be it is reused. Also thin clients tend to have short lifecycles
I said zero client, not thin client. A zero client is basically just a device that connects to remote computing, not unlike a dedicated streaming device.
That’s a thin client. You can rebrand it however many times you want. I still see em in the ewaste. At the end of the day you can’t remove the computing requirements of running a network stack, a crypto stack, a compression stack, HID, and frame and audio buffering.
No, it’s a zero client. A thin client has a desktop environment with a limited number of apps. Zero clients are less advanced than a raspberry pi.
That’s a much different environmental impact than a desktop.
Source: I used to run VDI for a global company for a living, deploying both thin and zero clients.
OnLive’s zero-client console wishes to have a word with you.
Oh wait, it can’t. It’s dead.
Even zero clients become outdated, with the additional detriment of being 100% dependent on the service they are connected to.
Maybe in theory, but in practice, Chromebooks.