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.

According to my local Japanese US embassy, there is no mention about what type of gaming/sport is allowed. They just say that it must have a certain degree of international recognition and the event must also be distinguished. Furthermore the whole reason this new visa was created was because Riot Games, the creators of League of Legends, the biggest MOBA PC game, lobbied for it, so I think it's safe to say that getting a visa for electronic gaming is easier than getting one for traditional table gaming tournaments.

I said nothing about requiring $1000 to beat the current generation. $1000 is what I spend to play the games in their FULL GLORY, read 1440p60 and beyond. Is that really hard to understand?

No offense but that "rig" is hardly a gaming one. As a PC and console gamer, spending more less than 800~1000 dollars on a gaming PC, specially if you're only gaming on a PC, feels like you're building a machine that with the worse of both worlds: The lack of power of consoles with the larger form factor and extra maintenance/knowhow/work required for a pc. Let alone the fact you won't be able to play many PC games at their full glory nor will enjoy any of the console exclusives. Unless you have a very limited and specific taste in non-demanding games and don't care how crappy a standard desktop PC looks in the TV rack, it's not really a good option.

WINE is not an emulator. Literally.

I wonder if there will be need for an full blown emulator(i.e. emulate everything down to the CPU) or a VM would suffice for this generation.

Personally I'd rather Sony swallowed that ego and release Orbis(the name of the BSD based OS on the playstation consoles) images for PCs. Most of their money is made by selling the software and services. Letting PC users install their OS and buy their games will expand their userbase at little to no cost. At least release some AMD based Vaios that can dual boot between Orbis and Windows.

I partially agree with you but partially agree with the parent post as well. Competition is good but fragmentation is not. Developer time is precious and limited. For one project to simultaneously develop for many similar APIs and ecosystems can be really costly and inefficient in many aspects. I personally would just prefer that each team focused on getting something that works well first on limited number of configurations first and then expand in to other APIs/devices/environments/OS later. Successful closed source projects/corporate world functions, I see no reason for open source not to adopt similar policies.

Random teenager downloads enough music CDs to fill his iPod -> millions in damage representing the sum of the full price of each song

US government downloads software on more devices it's licensed to -> get's a 90% discount in the fine and not even a warning