I wish I could mod both of you up, but unfortunately my unused mod points expired a couple of hours ago. 3.2B for just a freaking smoke detector with barely any market share yet. The profitable medical robotics company I work for, with real examples documented in scientific journals of improving and even saving lives, isn't worth a hundredth of that yet. Life is simply not fair...

Not disagreeing with your point about the need to reduce costs, but I'm not sure if India is a good reference in prices. What are they paying to their engineers and technicians? Is their hardware on par of American, Russian and European in terms of safety, reliability or capabilities? Is that number even correct and not made up? As a guy with no knowledge in the matter it's really hard to judge whether Obital/SpaceX costs are overpriced or not without knowing the reason those costs exist in first place and how India is doing their magic.

Everything capable of computing and is owned by a person is a PC: macs are PCs, the PS4 is a PC, smartphones and tablets are PCs, even my brand new Panasonic smart rice cooker is a PC. What people call "pc gaming" is nothing more than windows gaming. Windows games only work on windows/x86 machines(at least out of the box). Steam Machines are not an example of Valve trying to save windows gaming.

IMO, valve is instead trying to create a new version of "pc gaming", in the shape of an open home console(as opposed to the sony/nintendo model closed model) while also trying to expand in the next hot market: smart TVs/living rooms. Having it's own software and hardware platform where your service is the default is also a great way to reduce the visibility of rival game appstores like GOG, Origin and non steam popular games(Minecraft, LoL, Blizzard games).

Not only that but Valve is trying to save something, this something is itself. The business may look great nowadays, but it's foolish to think they're invincible. Windows and Mac are becoming walled gardens, not very friendly towards apps outside the official app stores. Windows PC sales are in record decline. 65 million steam accounts may look impressive at first glance but considering that steam is a FREE service and that even the PS3, the overpriced console that sold the least the last generation, still managed to grab 80 million users(let alone way over a hundred million PSN accounts), it's clear that Valve doesn't have as close as many users as it could. If Valve lose it's momentum, they could easily become irrelevant.

On the other hand as long as Actvision/Blizzard, Minecraft, EA and LoL (and in Japan, porn VNs) exist, Windows PC gaming will exist. Contrary to popular internet forum belief, Windows PC gaming is much more than Steam. I personally believe that, if wasn't for the crazy seasonal sales and mandatory steamworks in some games(Civ5 in my case), many people(including myself) wouldn't even bother with the service.

Because Google is a for profit business? "Giving" only happens if they can make money out of it.

I agree with you. But I also think eventually the content providers could also have a deal with ISPs to expand their networks in exchange for some of the profit. The Google Fiber project is in my opinion a very early sign of that: Google trying to provide fast internet so that people can use more google products. Sony is already a fiber provider in Japan and some other Asian countries as well.

They better not lose track of time. Honestly, after seeing the new prototype yesterday I'm stating to think the final product won't be available until 2015. If sony announces and releases a true VR headset for the PS4 this year(not the new HMZ whatever), they'll lose their biggest advantage: being the first to the market. And it's not only sony, valve is reportedly working on a vr headset of their own and there are also castAR, glyph and infinityEye as minor competitors as well.

On a side note why did they even bother showing a prototype at CES anyway? It's not like they need to attract funding and investors anymore. And it's hard to imagine that the CES crowd doesn't know about the rift anyway. At this R&D stage, secrecy is one of the keys for success.

It's the ultimate DRM. The only way to make a pirate copy of a cloud only streamed game is to rewrite the game yourself, to hack in their file servers or to physically steal one of their servers hardware with the copy. And cloud gaming is just the tip of the ice berg. Eventually everybody will have a 100Mbps+ low latency networks. It may take another decade or two but I'm sure it will happen, at least in the developed world. And when that happens, local computing machines, such as consoles and computers(and maybe even tablets and smartphones) as we know will pretty much cease to exist in the consumer mainstream marketplace. Everything will be a set up box to stream not only music and video but games and applications.

On a side note I really want that 4K projector that was announced right after the PS Now announcement.

Contrary to popular belief CES is not 100% about consumer electronics. The company I work for is currently at CES and have been for the past 2 years(as long as we existed). And guess what: we have no consumer products at all. Everything is B2B. And based on our experience it's been a good place(although not the best) to find big corporate clients. Unless you're a small company/start up trying to get in to a red ocean, you'll be fine.

5 years ago was 2009. Touch screen only Android 2.2 and iOS4 smartphones were already out. The difference between a a phone from today and 2009 and a phone from, 2009 and 2004 is much, much smaller (including even the advanced for the time Japanese feature phones). Not disagreeing with your point but, not really a good example.

On a side note I think it's going to take ages until there are processors and batteries small enough for making that lens an useful or desirable product. There is a good chance that company might go under even before releasing a final product. Just like electric cars. Over many decades several attempts were made and only recently with Tesla and Nissan we started seeing some good stuff.

Yeah, since we're talking about DARPA here, it's much more economical to make a robot that can share some of the hardware like guns and tools with humans than to make new connectors or protocols just for that.

There is also the psychological issue in things like healthcare or costumer service. For many people I think it's safer to say that they'll be more comfortable talking to a robot that looks like as human as possible than some menacing looking robot manipulator on wheels. And I don't think I need to explain why humanoid sexbots will be the best selling sexbots out there.

Finally, even in the case everything I said above turns out not to be important, there is the academic value. Many of the technological advances made for humanoids can be transferred over to other types of robotics.

Technically you are correct when you point out the number of games. But I don't think that doesn't really mean a lot. The PS Vita has over 1300 games available for it on the PSN and look how great its doing. I'd rather buy a platform that has one game I want than a platform with thousands that I don't.

Have a handful of system sellers is more important than having 100s of games no one cares about. Those 300 games? Mostly old Valve first party and indies that are available everywhere. A good chunk of hot PC games(Blizzard games, LoL, Minecraft, Origin) are not even on Steam, and even if those games were on Linux I find it hard to imagine the average joe sideloading the apps (basically the Android/Google Play situation).

I think the extra competition by the Steam Machines are a great opportunity for traditional console makers to review some of their outdated practices and offer more interesting products. Currently the only reason I buy consoles alongside my gaming PC are for the exclusives games(and the lack of which is also the reason I'm not interested on Steam OS). And because of that I wish them good but yeah, they will have to do something about that library. As for the other features, while interesting, they're secondary. Game consoles are for games. Steam machines are just open gaming consoles.

Somewhat like the entire internet, in particular Web 2.0 domains. People love to be vocal in the virtual world. OS wars, smartphones wars, console(and PC) wars, etc in the geek realm are nothing but a different shape of the same problem. Unfortunately I'd be lying if I said I'm not guilty as well.

Valve is showcasing a HMD of their own in January I think. Whether that will be co-developed with Oculus or not, or any other details as a matter of fact, are still unknown.

Ah the good old paper bag insurance fraud. The reason why all russians have dashcams in their vehicles.

1. Hides inside paperbag
2. Get's hit by car
3. ???
4. Profit

You bring a pretty interesting point. While I respect your point of view, on the other hand we have to remember that the entities behind e-sports are for profit companies and if they do anything that pisses off the community they'll end up losing users to rival games and lose money. Furthermore, while traditional games and sports are public domain, the entities that organize the events are not very different from your standard corporation. Anyone that can potentially do or say something that can potentially go against their or their partner's interests can be put out of the game. This is an outdated, far from perfect example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics_Black_Power_salute but I think it illustrates my point.