Near future tech and CoH

My first computer was a minicomputer.

My next was an 8088-based microcomputer.

And even in '79, there was talk that full-blown computer systems weren't needed at home and that other appliance-type devices would serve better.

While it may be hyperbole, it's not quite as hyperbolic as you'd imagine.

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Keep that stance. The "Cloud" is going to last until Cisco, Google, or one of the other big companies is hacked, and then it will die like the fad it is. And this isn't an "if" - it's a when. One of these companies will get hacked, and everything in their "Cloud" will be compromised, and then everyone will realise that we keep control of our own data for a reason.

I, fortunately, work at a place where I can wave around HIPAA and get people to cool down on fads, but corporations have to deal with tech-loving IT heads like your boss, so it's them that will take the bite on this one.

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

Or the caps on data services from internet service providers become too draconian.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Yeah; the loss of Net Neutrality (which would have to precede such a thing) would probably destroy the Cloud too, but I see that as less likely than hacking.

What do you mean "until"? "Cloud" providers are being compromised left, right & centre and they're only the ones that actually get a) Discovered and b) Reported. Note that I'm not just talking about hacking here, I'm also talking about unscrupulous companies and/or their employees selling customer data, governments being granted access to data for what usually amounts to a legal fishing expedition and so forth. Only reason that it's all still going is that people are, by and large, morons (or at least lazy and ignorant) when it comes to securing their personal information (see: Every Facebook profile).

If you're storing *anything* in the cloud that contains personal, confidential, sensitive, private or important information then you damn well better be a) Encrypting it and b) Backing it up locally (And no, the cloud is not a backup solution unless you have contractually enforced SLAs - and even then I'd hesitate to rely on it - the cloud is more akin to RAID) or you're just asking for trouble.

Depends on what you mean by "move to the cloud?" I can play it, rather poorly, on an airplane now. (ba-dum.)

COH already "lives" there. We use a client and store *very* little data locally (configuration, screenshots/logs,) while all the stuff that makes COH COH goes on on a server somewhere else. The only way to make it more of a "cloudy" game would be to access it through a web browser... and personally, I think that would suck so badly it'd not just put Hoover out of business, but suck back through time so they never got started.

"The cloud" isn't going away - but neither is it new. You use email, right? You've seen webmail? Hell, we can probably point all the way back to dumb terminals time-sharing somewhere as "having used the cybermesozoic Cloud." But there's no way I'm living there - no Chromebooks for me, thanks, unless they can access the data I'm storing *locally* for when (not if) the 'net goes down, for instance.

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Well if you jump into the wayback machine there was a belief that less than a dozen commercial computers would ever be needed in the whole world.

And of course back in the late 70s there was talk about computers weren't needed in the home. They were still primitive, expensive toys that stored software on cassette tape, unless you spent the big bucks on a floppy disk drive. VisiCalc finally make the Apple II useful for business but for home use? Other than computer nerds there wasn't a reason for computers at home. The only person I knew in high school in the late 70s with a home computer was the father of this tall (really long legs) girl and it was a Commodore PET with the non touchtype friendly square key layout. Couldn't understand how he could type on it, her dad was huge and had Thing fingers.

Other than a few games from Byte and Creative Computing you had to type in, written in BASIC or had a BASIC loader of an assembly program that was coded as a long list of DATA lines, there really wasn't anything useful a computer could do in the home.

Computers had to take over the office first and then they flooded into people's homes. And still there weren't any really killer apps for the home until maybe Quicken, and of course Office as kids learned to use a computer to write their school reports instead of a typewriter with a correction ribbon. But there were PC games. The D&D Gold box games. Ultima, Wizardry, Loom, Sierra adventure games, Microprose Sid Meyer games like Pirates, F-15, F-19, Gunship. Boot floppies, code wheels, manual keyword look-up for copy protection. Prodigy, Compuserve, local BBS sites ruled online. But really there wasn't anything the computer was needed for in the home.

The game consoles that came after the game crash of the 70s brought gaming into the home bigtime and it was a lot easier than needing to install an Adlib MIDI card and know enough to pick an unused IRQ. You didn't need to reoptimize your autoexec.bat and config.sys for every new game as each needed just a little bit more memory. Sony gave us the drop in CD with the PS1 and the rest was history.

Sure for us old timers, finding a workable driver or upgrading the hardware is second nature for PC gaming but that doesn't work for the rest of the world. And once you take PC gaming out of the mix, what is needed in a home computer today? Web browsing and reasonable video playback. Yes Office is still around for those who need to write reports but a quad core i5-2500K isn't really needed for that.

Me and my friends own full blown PCs because we all work with computers as developers or web monkeys or IT. Our parents own computers because we insisted they do. But all they use it for is web browsing, e-mail and some casual gaming. And for most of them, a 2nd or 3rd gen tablet with a keyboard dock for the few times they need to write more than a line or two would be sufficient.

This is the reason why I've finally accepted that I'm going to have to get a cellphone -- when I bought my house last year and moved, I discovered that the digital phone service my cable provider offered had changed, and was now VOIP -- which meant that, when I lost signal on my cablemodem, I discovered that I'd also lost phone service, and was unable to report the outage (an effective but underhanded way to drive down the number of service outage calls -- they lose service, they have no way to call and report it).

I'll add a second -- Back when "City of Hero" was released to the Asian market with a Korean version, there was a standalone application that was just the costume creator -- and at several Comic-Cons, I've seen NCSoft with a standalone costume creator that let you run the character through several animations. Make that an iPad and Android app, with the ability to save costume/powerset files and transfer them between your computer and your mobile device, and you'd have everyone with the app out showing off one of CoX's strengths -- it's complete rejection of the "your appearance is dictated by your gear" theme that virtually every other MMO has.

In a game like this, the way its interface is designed, you'd pretty much have to have a decent sized screen, mouse and full keyboard to play it. I know there are people who play this game on laptops with reduced keyboards and trackpads and I can only wince in pain. It's doable but not comfortable.

But it this 4G superduper wireless Internet world, pretty much any big screen and decent table top can support this game and a reasonable keyboard and mouse. Who cares where the CPU and storage is?

And if the interface can be adapted to use with something as cryptoclumsy as a console controller, that breaks the chain of the keyboard and mouse. And again who cares where CPU and storage is?

But touch screen?! Ew! No thanks!

Internet service providers would care because a greatly increased demand on bandwidth across their network from streaming video and data for a client terminal, OnLive-style system would result in network congestion and lead to packet shaping, bandwidth restrictions and so forth.

Unless you pay a premium for your traffic to be prioritized, which would go against the concept of net neutrality.

Also, every party you add to a process, is something else that can go wrong. Currently to play CoH, I need:

1: Power
2: Internet
3: NCSoft

With client terminal gaming you'd then need to have the streaming game service as 3, and shift NCSoft to 4.

And then you'd likely have to pay for the ability not to have your packets shaped or bandwidth cut to use the services with your ISP. That's one extra part of the chain and two extra payments.

Regarding tablets in general, to take a look at Apple's offering, what if your favourite game/game distribution system isn't supported on it? Or if they shelve support for it. In a tightly controlled market place, it's easy to strangle, and then you're left to hang. You may also be looking at a reduced lifespan due to heat/components, or the death of planned obsolescence.

I suppose the only advantage is that when it does die, you don't have to worry about your personal data when you ship it off to be repaired.

It'll all be on the cloud. :P

Edit: Also you're looking at double serving of latency as well. Connection from Tablet to Game Streaming Service, and then Game Streaming Service to MMO Game Servers.

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SUPPORT - IT'S NOT JUST A GROUPING OF ATs
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More Than a Game
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Actually, that's one of the nicer points for some companies with regard to cloud. A cloud provider is able to centralize and put economies of scale to work for security purposes. Of course, as in all things, it's a matter of having a partner you can trust to do their part well.

Or in the case of some security providers, lie about the extent of damage for a few months until the public forgets about it. Of course, incidents such as that tend to just highlight that you need to plan for data compromises to occur as well.

I know there's an oxymoron in here somewhere ... why can't I find it?

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

I've always thought that senior managers are the perfect target market for tablets. They like to look at pretty graphs, and they don't actually have to type much.

Stop. Drowning in market-speak here.

Repeat after me.

SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Sorry, I should have made it clear. I should have differentiated between your internal home network and the actual Internet itself. Of course, for efficiency, the game client must still within your subnet, not on the Internet itself.

Sorry for being sloppy. Otherwise, I think much of what I said is still valid.

My Security+ certification agrees with this stance. Ideally, you never want a single point of failure security system. Especially not one where that single point of failure means "economies of scale" have been compromised. It's one thing for Cisco to fail and for Cisco's information to be compromised; it's quite another thing for Cisco to fail and for five-hundred different companies' information to be compromised.

Very true.

My concern with the cloud is also bandwidth.

• Local ISP's are already choking on the surge of Netflix use.
• My company's corporate connection to the 'net is already choked enough with people illicitly streaming music throughout the day.
• I'm dealing with school districts that are fretting over their monthly bandwidth costs because they use a special network shared by their respective states that hasn't adapted to the surge in educational web video.

So, yes, let's chromebook up those clients so every document, every image, and every video is sent over that narrow pipe. Let's all start using "cloud gaming" where everything is pre-rendered on a server and then streamed to your screen like a friggin video 1000x (at least) more bandwidth intensive than the worst current client-server games. Let's increase bandwidth another hundredfold and then stand in stunned disbelief when ISP's announce the end of "unlimited" bandwidth and tiered pricing so they can afford to upgrade their infrastructure.

Oh, I meant in general, really. At the moment it's perfectly possible and has been done to stream the game client from your home PC to a tablet, but as a friend who did such said, the controls are the big problem, so yes, you'd need an external keyboard and mouse. Of course it can be argued that games designed for tablet play would suit the control scheme better, but the problem rests on communications in a MMO sense, and...

Well, really, not everyone wants to play tablet games, like not everyone wants to play Popcap Games offerings at the moment. I can't imagine myself playing a Fallout game on a tablet, or Deus Ex, or so forth. Some games just suit the gaming PC as we have now better.

I can see that there are uses for tablets, but I think the general public needs to take a long look at them before making any snap decisions based on tech 'moguls' and financially interested parties preaching on the future.

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SUPPORT - IT'S NOT JUST A GROUPING OF ATs
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More Than a Game
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Agreed.

Then again, take a 10+ inch tablet, give it a screen mount with a corresponding keyboard and mouse. Stick it on the desktop of your average office worker or (non-gamer) home user. That will be capable of doing a good bit of what these users have come to expect from their computer-- particularly when a MS OS gets into the fray. They get all that PLUS the ability to "grab and go" to undock from that mound and take the tablet with them to the office meetings or offsite work. That, for roughly the cost of what the next round of PC upgrades is going to cost.

It won't be EVERYWHERE, but if enough people say 'this meets our needs' and spend their money there rather than a better PC then you have a market shift that WILL impact whether a developer decides to spend $60m on a new game that will cater to the shrinking demographic of PC users with capable PC's... or cut the budget to $30m.... or keep it at $60m, but design it in a way that the lower-end systems can still access...

I expect tablets to supplant PCs to some extent in the future, largely because of what Chase posted above. As tablet hardware becomes more powerful, the tablet will become the PC, and you'll have a docking station with keyboard, video and mouse (KVM) attached to it. Perhaps even a docking station with a dedicated video card, to beef up the graphics capabilities while docked without burdening the tablet's battery when it is undocked. Use it for graphics-intensive programs, or activities that just work better with a KVM setup (word-processing, spreadsheets, etc.), but keep the portability for when it's needed. Win/win.

The notion of cloud computing being nothing more than essentially hosted services is probably about as far off the mark as saying smartphones when they were invented were just crappy computers that could make phonecalls.

You're starting to see more evolution in the area where the public cloud interacts with private cloud services, in areas where you want a combination of localized control and distributed services.

Honestly, I think the two biggest long-term benefits of cloud computing won't be the literal cloud services: it will be the long term commoditization of distributed computing and storage, and the infrastructure standards that are just starting to form.

The IBM PC was not the computer we all eventually owned. It was the computer that created the ecosystem 90% of us live in today. The cloud ecosystem is going to be the bigger win in the longer run. And by the time its matured, it will probably also become invisible.

Another thing to consider is that the average company's idea of security and fault tolerance is Norton antivirus and a UPS. For many people, cloud hosting is a huge step up. For the companies for which its potentially a step down, there are ways to leverage the services while still maintaining the security and integrity of the system if you know what you are doing.

Honestly, the biggest tripping point that tends to become problematic in real enterprise class cloud computing is an often under-appreciated or poorly understood requirement many organizations have to obey: geolocation of information. Many organizations have restrictions on precisely *where* they can store their data. Government agencies, the military, financial institutions, all have restrictions on where they can put data. Cloud vendors don't often have enforced storage boundaries. And that disqualifies them right off the bat.

I used to say that cloud computing was just a marketing fluff term, and it was. It was really a convergence of technologies: virtualized and commoditized computing, massive distributed storage, and large content distribution networks. No one really knew what that would become besides launchpads for services like gmail. But I think we're getting a better idea collectively now.

You're arguing against a monolithic structure for security. Yes, you have a single 'provider' of service, however, that does not mean you only have one security solution in play. Nothing should stop you from using a RSA token solution and encrypting your data on EC2.

Course, here's the funny thing. If any hardware provider's security [cisco is actually a good example here, although I also like RSA for the immediate reference] gets compromised, the entire footprint of their products security are compromised. That's why it's kind of important to keep up to date on your security updates [as I'm sure you know]. Is it more likely for those 500 companies to update their security methods or for the one company whose lifeblood is maintaining the trust of their clients. Perhaps really the only advantage a monolithic setup has in assuring security updates are applied across the entire platform.

Oh yeah, I definitely agree, doing games like CoH on a tablet would suck!