I do and always will love Dirk Gently holistic detective season 1. All the nuts randomness and weirdness of episode 1...is paid off thuroghly by the end. Loved every moment.

Also, LEGION is terrific.

I work at a small hospital who adopted the google suite about 2 years ago. Nobody in the the org - including new hire twenty-somethings - seem to know anything about sharing docs or collaborative working. It's all about "why can't I open the word document?". Those same people don't know where the start button is either though. Guess we didn't get the fancy employees who grew up with google docs.

As I understand it the games are not ports but actual for instance PC games being streamed to a subscriber.

I can see it appealing to people who have great internet but for whatever reason on interest in game consoles or a high end gaming PC. Maybe such a person just has i-devices and a Nintendo switch but would like to see what the fuss is about with Red Dead redemption 2. So maybe a chromecast ultra is an alternative a way to do that for such a person. I don't actually know the size of such an audience. Just saying the audience might exist.

Of course it could also be somebody at google realized that had a lot idle servers and extra bandwidth and saw this as a way to both monetize those resources while also demonstrating to potential cloud customers the capabilities of their cloud.

Well i assumed it is still a work in progress. Not sure how much I really want the DRM crap on my PC anyway whether windows or linux. Might have to give it a few more years for it be primetime ready. I can use wine or something else if there's something i really can't live without. I haven't gotten into PUBG anyway. I did put Fortnite on my Switch though.

I watched this video immediately before opening slashdot and seeing this story. By coincidence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I actually already knew something about this. Just happen to see Linus' rendition. Not Torvalds. The other one.

Seems like Valve really has had it out for MS going to back windows 8. Now there's really no reason to run Win 10 any more. Unless you want to manage hyper-v.

Something about this doesn't quite sound right.
I'm assuming there's a reason those empty boxes only only a "download the game at ______" are still showing up in wal-mart etc. I assume contractual obligations to the retail stores (otherwise there would just be a poster ad for the game or a voucher with a key you pickup. Why bother with a physical box?).

Just my speculation, obviously: I would guess Ubisoft (probably in connection with other developers/publishers) are negotiating their terms with the likes of gamestop etc. This is about the time of year conversations would have to start about what's going in to retail for the fall/holiday season. By having an article like this released talking up the advantages of streaming games with low end, generic hardware this guy is effectively making a rude hand gesture at some still powerful retail chains. I bet he's just trying to get the best price for promotion versus money spent shipping physical items. By singing of the praises of game streaming he's telling the retailers he doesn't need them.

In fact it wouldn't surprise me if in reality he hasn't even contemplated what the landscape will be for retail gaming in in 2028. He's just trying to get better/cheaper terms with the retailers. The negotiations just happened to have spilled out into public.

They can't kill it. The site itself is open source. Literally anyone can clone it at literally any time. They can turn off the thing branded "github" if they wanted. But that's like saying you can kill Linux by acquiring and shutting down Redhat: Linux would keep going. And so would git/web-based git hosting services.

Not really comparable as these things have difference audiences and purposes and reasons for acquisition. GitHub seems like a pure brand name purchase since as I mentioned MS could have easily cloned the site at any time. If the UI etc is ruined another site will pop up and replace it. Programmers aren't like your average Hotmail user. They're much more of a picky lot.

If someone is really worried about competing/illegal project said someone can always oh I don't know...host the project on their own web site/host. Not like it's hard. Especially for this hypothetical programmer we're talking about. And it's git after all. I mean...clone the project?

I don't think they bought it so much to make the money back as to buy the brand.

I haven't ready all the comments here yet but I haven't seen anybody point it out: GitHub itself is hosted on github. In other words ANYONE, including Microsoft, could literally clone the github website and have their own version of it up and running in...what? Inside 12 hours? It's not the site that's worth the money, it's the "good will" associated with the name that's worth the money.

Not sure why everybody is acting like this is the end of the world that MS bought the name since as I said literally anyone can literally clone the site at literally any time. Might be expensive if it's starts to get popular. The point is it's possible.

MS has had a number of open source projects on github for years btw. Visual Code seems like it's well regarded. And not that I'm that far into the Minecraft community but that seems to be doing fine under MS. They even released it for competing game consoles (like switch). Still not clear why everybody is freaking out over this. Look at the past 10 years of history for MS and it doesn't seem like they're evil. Seems more like their a "declining empire" trying to stay relevant (but that's an unrelated thought).

Thanks for the suggestions on RDP clients. I just kind of went with the first one that came up in the search.

And for Steam that's actually what I meant. Eventually I'll have the native steam client for Linux installed and stream or use wine for whatever doesn't run native. The prior laptop is setup as something of a game console right now. I can always play the games that support gamepad that way. I won't be running out of games for a really, really long time.

Well it's marked funny but if MS actually took 18 months to release a truly polished build...I for one would be okay with that.

I went through the same the same thing. After the constant new windows builds being pushed to me and removing candy crush for the thousandth time I decided I would try linux on my new laptop. My old laptop is acting as my kind of term server for windows stuff. So you could say I'm "cheating".

To be fair, my new laptop is an alienware 15" - e.g. a bunch of proprietary crap. I first tried (and am currently running) Mint 17.10 - almost all the different DE versions - but the installer would often lock up or cause other issues. I don't know if that's the architecture, the nvme boot device or what it was. But eventually, some how, I was able to get the stupid thing to install (the proprietary driver extensions actually caused more lock ups). I installed an RDP client (remina, something like that) so I could connect to my windows 10 machine when needed (work has a windows-only VPN client and I have hundreds of steam games) and for the most part it has worked without any issues. Doesn't hurt that the only applications I seem to run are chrome and that RDP client.

The main problem I have involves rebooting the machine in so far as it doesn't on the first try. And there seems to be a subsystem update that never finishes installing. But since the OS is usable it's hard to care. And even though there's a clear option to switch from the nvidia GPU to the intel GPU doing so completely disables the entire OS forcing a re-install (if I knew more I assume I could rescue it but it's easier to wipe the storage and start over).

Eventually I'll try Mint 18 to see if hardware support has improved. But at least the OS is usable on some level now.

I guess my only point is that it depends on how much you care about those 8 gig build pushes every 6 months and removing candy crush on a regular basis. Is that annoyance outweigh the frustration of getting a linux distro to work? For me it was totally worth it. With the RDP cheating thing.

If there's a CIA sniper with a laser sight on the back of his head...is it still illegal?

I read a little about "streaming" games around 2010...I think it was called "onLive", something like that. I was actually living in a house with a fiber optic connection. Probably one of the few places in the whole of north america with a low latency connection that could of worked with the streaming service.

I never signed up for it though to even try. From what I could tell at the time you had to actually "purchase" a game at the full price of $60 which was non-transferable and non-refundable. In other words if the service was down for maintenance or went out of business the developer would keep my $60 and would have nothing to show for it. No physical disk, no license key, nothing. Didn't sound like such a great to me.

I only told that anecdote to engage in uninformed speculation: google has something of a history of adopting an existing thing but putting some new twist on it. When gmail came out for instance it was unique in it's 'unlimited" email space which was a departure at the time from yahoo/hotmail/etc. And when they got started in the MVNO business they adopted multiple networks (with Google FI). And I don't think there was anything quite like an OS revolving around a web browser so thoroughly before ChromeOS came out.

So to engage in a little uniformed speculation I would expect some similar twist on a "gaming service" they released. I think game streaming makes sense on some level. I know they have data centers for miles and miles. And it wouldn't surprise me if some amount of them sat idle for some percentage of time. And it could be used to advertise their services against competitor services (Azure and Amazon's cloud for instance). They would have their own twist on it though. Maybe it would be a $10/month unlimited thing. Maybe it would mainly focus on android games. Or maybe it would lean more towards a "limited device set" like Google Fi and there would just be a set of "google game streaming compatible" devices in TVs and certain tablets.

How the latency/compression thing would be resolved I have no idea. Unless they just focused on more turned based/slow moving stuff more akin to civilization games.

It has kind of a twilight zone vibe to it. But really modern. Actually this most recent season has a very science fiction episode I loved. For books there's "old man's war". I loved the first one the most. I thought it was going to adapted into a show but last I read about that was years ago. Also book series is "the frontier saga". Its on book...22 I want to say. Author seems to release multiple a year. He's planning like 50 total, something crazy like that. And....I don't know if there's enough information to call "Mr robot" science fiction but...Mr robot.

Good thing I have slashdot commenters to know this stuff for me. So ya. What guy this said...