So close, but instead of a poster, it's a 140 character scribble on the bathroom wall of the Internet, and childish clips of kids kicking each other in their nuts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_4jrMwvZ2A

Your point is a big part of why management should be very careful about apparent 'cost savings' In a large amount of cases, management is chasing a buzzword more than carefully examining what comprises their budget for in-house versus cloud hosted.

Part of the cost savings of the cloud operator is having them do things to the data that most companies would never approve for themselves. Additionally, only a relatively small portion of the expense is moved 'to the cloud'. A lot of work still *should* happen that is lumped into the presumed cost of being internal versus external. So either a new budget starts growing to cover the cost previously not broken out or work stops happening that may critically matter.

Actually, if anything the typical cloud experience doubles down on proprietary tools. Sure the vendor may be availing themselves of open technologies on the backend, but the vast majority of them use proprietary interfaces to interact with their customers.

ntp is surprisingly complex to deal with a surprisingly complex thing. If tlsdate was a decent enough utility, then we'd still be using the time protocol of rdate as the go-to time sync strategy. Precision and quality is much lower.

There's also a couple of tricky things. One is that it could be dropped in TLS 1.3. Another is that it doesn't play with the concept of TLS certificate expiry.

Basically, this is a potentially handy utility to take the place of rdate, not something that begins to touch ntp.

Much like a creative decision making meeting at SyFy, any stupid idea will be made.

Shark Nebula!

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

So I'm not the only one who read that as the basis for a bad made-for-SyFy movie.

Plucky protagonist: Oh no, the Starivore is coming to eat our sun!

Glasses wearing scientist: Yes Plucky, and there's nothing we can do about it!

Ribbon laden general: We'll nuke it!

Plucky protagonist: But the nuclear detonation would only make it stronger.

Glasses wearing scientist: You have a point there Plucky, I'm glad you figured that out before we made a terrible mistake.

Ribbon laden general: Too late, the missiles have already launched, there's nothing we can do.

Glasses wearing scientist: There's only one thing we can do, stop it with a black hole!

[all somewhat technical people viewing it]: shit, I should have known better than to watch more SyFy channel crap.

Shit, I really shouldn't have said anything. Now they'll really make that movie. Right after Sharkgle.

Perhaps you reacted a bit strongly. Keeping in mind the thread was oversimplifying to imply nothing has changed in 20 years tech wise, I naturally presumed you were supprting that argument by saying the high end 20 years ago had everything that the consumer level is offering, which isn't so.

When I say huge, I mean huge compared to looking at the same environment on a monitor with no tracking. When you say it is nothing next to high-cost solutions, that's almost certainly true, but not relevant to the consumer space. In much the same way an automotive company needs a rack of servers and a meticulous model of a vehicle to simulate a car crash for their purposes, but a game developer can make a car model in a matter of minutes that can be deformed by a physics engine running on a single core enough for a gaming situation, consumer grade VR doesn't need the things you are talking about. Similarly, the communication needs for multiple players depending on game design isn't going to be more than a conventional shooter game.

I last tried a high end professional VR environment in the 90s, and even then just as a guest, not an expert. My current perspective is totally based on my first hand experience with an Oculus, firmly rooted in the consumer electronics world. It's just odd because it seems remarkably capable and all my guests felt it was in the right ballpark, but then people say it can't be remotely adequate.

Close one eye. Move your head left or right. Congratulations, you perceived 3d information by parallax. Same thing works in reality and VR. If you can't see it in reality, then of course you can't see it in VR, but your perception of reality continues to have you understanding depth.

Two eyes provides depth information without head movement for a few meters. Moving the head provides the information over greater range and works with one eye or two.

I won't notice better than 48 hz, except how it impacts my head tracking. 60 fps versus 75 fps when head tracking is involved at least appears very different. There could be an issue with some factors not being done perfectly right or an unfortunate interaction with the motion sampling frequency that could change, but at least for now it looks night and day to me.

I guess I'm a bit perplexed at this statement. The current DK2 uses two USB 2 ports (for camera data and motion tracking). A tiny fraction of modern IO capabilities, and it seems to do just fine. Sure it only tracks the head, but technology adding more tracking seems content with USB as a bus. I'm not sure what IO load you are referring to that would be infeasible with modern systems.

Well, just head tracking is *huge*, though the lack of positional tracking without augmentation is an issue. My point is those sorts of sensors, which are a valuable component of comprehensive motion tracking, are now commodity items. DK2 provided good experience using camera based tracking to what amounts to a somewhat higher end version of common motion tracking equipment.

In general, you make it sound like you haven't been involved in the market since RH ES3 days. I had the opportunity to experience VR demos back then in a few instances, and it wasn't compelling. It's night and day compared to the DK2. I haven't had the chance to demo modern high-end VR simulators, I can't imagine how those have changed since back then.

So you wouldn't watch any movies because you can't feel anything? You wouldn't play any sort of game because none of them provide perfect immersion?

We are talking about a rather *large* step in progressing immersion. Going from text adventure to side scrolling/overhead games to wolfenstein 3d to doom to quake, etc. Each step has added a new dimension to immersion, and this is just another step. It's not the last step but why bother waiting for the last step while settling for lesser immersion than is possible?

So I don't use mass transit. If I did, I would be looking harder at GearVR to watch movies on my commute, no problem. This is something that really should be tried before going out of your way to dismiss it as having any market at all. It really isn't a bad idea for a significant chunk of people.

I have absolutely no issues playing for a long time. At least no problems unique to VR (as a husband and a father, binge gaming is usually off the table). I have played for hours on end while my family went out to do something a couple of times. The headset doesn't weigh much, meaning your neck doesn't get tired. The focus is at infinity, so it doesn't fatigue your eyes to focus. Some people prone to sickness may not be able to cope, but so far the people I know that have tried it and said they got sick can't play FPS games either for the same reason.

I won't claim my experience is how it will be for everyone, but I can't imagine I'm unique in not getting at all sick or fatigued.

I personally spend most of my time in it watching video. It allows me to have an impossibly large screen, without being intrusive to my family. It also allows me to watch content and play computer games that my daughter shouldn't be seeing/hearing.

Simulator gaming is certainly a big one, but I would like more FPS and even third-person perspective gaming as well. I'm utterly immune to being simulator sick, so I'm eager for experiences that might not work for everyone.

I also enjoy the more laid back experiences. I would love to see new star trek interactive technical manual software, for example.

I think any 3d gaming experience naturally suggests VR enhancing it, but there are other opportunities. Not everyone will stand for the bother of putting on goggles to experience it, but there's some of us who are perfectly fine.

Home computers weren't ubiquitous in the 80s, but they did have a substantial footprint. However, they could do highly useful things. They could do spreadsheets, be glorified word processors, and play 2D games and players wouldn't be tortured that it wasn't remotely realistic.

The problem in the 90s was that VR was frankly unworkable at all. Spend 20-30 thousand (about 10 times more than a PC of the time), and you had an experience that wasn't remotely adequate (low field of view, origami looking models, less than 10 frames per second, terrible display behavior, and 10 or so pounds of head weight). At that price range, nothing other than houses and cars ever has become a common household thing, and VR is more of an 'all or nothing' proposition. The technology was simply not ready at all.

Oculus took the step to recognize that dedicated VR displays will never be cost effective, but mobile phone dpi has resulted in displays that are usable out-of-the-box. Sure there's software and tweaking firmware wise, but the components in most people's pockets can be used for VR construction. The advanced hardware plays a role, but the cost savings of that situation is probably the most critical.

Given that this time around the designs are generally based around slightly tweaked mass-market products, the price is in the neighborhood of a game console or high end desktop GPU. Gaming is enough to sustain those markets (yes, gaming consoles can do more now, but people would buy a sub-50 dollar product if they didn't care about games, and yes higher end desktop GPUs can be used in professional graphics, but that's usually a distinct product family).

That said, I do enjoy the experiences that are more mellow and aimless that people are bothering to do for VR that they didn't bother to do in a conventional display. Sure, gaming is great and so is watching a video in an apparently large screen (could use better resolution), but I like calmly exploring nice environments.

I don't think Facebook's 2 billion dollar investment will be justified, but I do think it's a viable market and my wallet is ready for the next step after Oculus DK2 (have the DK2 and have gotten more mileage out of that gadget than any gadget in remotely recent history.