Good news everyone!: From Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Net Neutrality (HBO).

The rather unexpected follow-up:
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Tom Wheeler Is Not A Dingo (HBO)

The FCC has you covered... in coyote urine.

I think it's a conspiracy. With ever increasing hard drive and media that we can store data on, we need ever larger file types and quality types in order to fill that space so we buy hard drives and media at the same rate.

That combined with data recovery in cases where hard drives crash, the more data they have to recover the more it costs you... (Something like $200 just to look at it, plus $1-$50 per meg recovered)

Yeah, good luck with that one. As Fictionvision pointed out, many PC games nowadays require huge multi-gig day-one patches to make them run in the first place. This phenomenon has started manifesting itself on consoles as well in a few limited cases, although it has transpired in the meantime that the problems with the unpatched versions were grossly exaggerated (Wolfenstein was buggy unpatched but not unplayable, and Sniper Elite 3 was fine).

I have to wonder if this is part of the reason why third-parties have given Nintendo the cold shoulder - there hasn't been a single-case of an unpatched game being broken upon release on the Wii U or classic Wii, leading me to believe that Nintendo's cert process is more extensive and less tolerant of the bullshit of companies like Bethesda and EA.

Ultimately though, the fact that a game for the most part works out of the box on consoles and is free of online DRM puts it head and shoulders above PC gaming for me at the moment. I hope with the increase in game sizes and with the ilkely success of The Witcher 3, we'll see more and more publishers using DRM-free on physical media in the future. The indie market notwithstanding, it's been a bit of a dark age for PC gaming these past 6-7 years.

A quick thing to bear in mind by the way - game sizes have grown over 600% on average since 2004 (based on 6GB in 2004 compared to 40GB today), but the average internet connection speed has only grown by around 300-400% in that time (2 mbit in 2004 to 6 mbit today). The reason many regions have stalled at around 6 mbit is that it is the sweet spot at the moment for video streaming - Netflix and the like. Gaming barely even factors into it.

What the fuck?! If the game is already installed, the larger parts of the game - models, textures, music, movies, etc - should already be present on the system, so... ???

GOG (or someone else) has yet to invent a client with delta patching. Having assets already present on the system won't help you if it's one monolithic file and they need to change something.

Think of it this way:
If these files were set up as an office building, and you want to change some small part of it, like the steel in reinforced concrete, then you just have to demolish the whole thing and build it back up.

I rather blame bandwidth limits and caps than the size of games as they will naturally grow exponentially. Granted, too many modern games are too large because of uncompressed textures or excessive amount of cutscenes.

Yeah, I get that. I've modded a good bit for several games. Assets must often be unpacked from giant archives, etc. I guess the question should have been "How are they still getting away with this shit given how large modern assets have become?"

Aside from hiding your files, what the hell does packing them into an archive even do? It can't be easier for the game to load them, can it? After all, they'd have to be unpacked before use... right? It saves storage space, I guess, but is that worth the horrendous waste of bandwidth? You can't expect everyone to download a several gigabyte archive every time a single file needs to be patched. Millions of gamers, all downloading gigabytes of unnecessary data... it's ridiculous.

haha you guys have still not experienced patches and downloading on consoles i assume , its way worse than pc

first , if you by chance break your download at 99% the console will not verify the download next time , you will have to redownload from scratch

second , if its a console update , in game updates you cant even multitask you will be stuck at the download screen , if you want to back out then the download will be cancelled no resuming.

Try playing some EA games on consoles you will come running back to the method with a smile.

Bottomline : Its far worse on consoles than on pc .

The last two generations of consoles ARE basically PC's, just locked down so you can't use it for anything you want... and by PC I'm not meaning x86 architecture, I'm meaning it's got enough resources and more than powerful enough to be used for all your computer needs (plus a beefy video card). The PS3 made it obvious when the option of having Linux installed so you could use it as a home computer. Sounded like a great idea! Not only can you do programming and use it as a personal computer, but you can play games and stuff on it too...

Then they ripped that out... The one thing that made me excited by the PS3...

Well, Team Trinux has Linux partially up and running on the Wii U.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfYRdkEemU0

The problem from ISPs point of view is: who's going to pay for the extra investments needed for the rising data transfers? This is made even worse by the fact that at the same time people are using more and more internet on all devices, they are making less and less voice calls and sending SMS, which used to be the big money makers for phone operators (which at least here are usually the same as the the ISPs). These ISPs/phone operators are not making any money from people sending tweets or Facebook profile updates, instead of sending SMS.

I used to be a big supporter of unlimited data transfers, but now I am starting to feel maybe it is not really fair to either:
- the ISPs who don't necessarily benefit much of increased usage of social media, streaming videos from internet etc.
- the users who use internet still quite lightly and occasionally

So in that sense I feel at least for the basic internet connections, maybe some caps or pay per megabyte would be more fair all in all, than that all pay the same regardless of how heavily they use it. I'd just hope that the price per megabyte (or gigabyte or whatever) would be quite low, but still the light users would pay less than heavy users. Maybe there would be also truly uncapped connections as well, for a premium monthly fee. So you'd get an uncapped connection only if you expect to be using it heavily all the time.

Hard to say which way it will go though, and maybe a new equilibrium is found at some point and this becomes a non-issue. Competition will take care of it, and maybe there indeed will be also service-specific internet connections where the unlimited data transfers are only for the services offered by the internet provider (e.g. you wouldn't necessarily get HD-level Netflix feed with an Amazon internet connection).


For what it's worth, down here fixed internet connections seem generally uncapped (I have an uncapped 10Mbps ADSL line for what I feel is a pretty affordable price, and it includes also apparently an uncapped 3G data SIM as well), with mobile connections it varies. The basic ones are capped. Not sure how it will be in the future.

The ISP's here in the US keep finding ways to raise the price without improving the quality of service (or even in some cases they reduce the quality of service by adding caps that weren't there before). I think they'll have to start reinvesting some of that money into improving their networks otherwise sooner or the later the courts will get rid of the legal restrictions on other companies trying to compete with them. Currently if another company like Google tries to lay cables for their Google Fiber thing (or even if a city wants to make a municipal network for its residents) then Comcast and the other cable companies fight it in court claiming it's illegal and no one else is allowed to compete with them. If they keep taking advantage of their localized monopolies then they'll get treated the same way that AT&T did back when it had a telephone monopoly.

I think most people have different contracts for cell phones versus internet. My landline is bundled with my internet but it has unlimited calling within the US so it's the same money for them regardless of how many calls I make. Then I have a different company for my cell phone (which also has unlimited calling and texting, and technically unlimited data although it's very slow if I was to download more than 1 GB on the phone within a month). There's a lot more competition with phones, especially cell phones, because the government regulations are a lot more pro-competition and nobody has a legal monopoly on phone lines anymore (and definitely not for cell phones which don't even need phone lines).

I think sooner or later the internet will be treated the same way as the phone lines by the government which will result in a lot more competition and we'll finally see the internet catch up with the increasing size of data. I'm not sure how it is elsewhere, but I got the impression that a lot of countries already had faster and less limited internet than the US so hopefully the internet situation will get better for everyone in general over the next few years.

The space reqs for AAAs keep growing because of graphics which takes the lion's share of the size, but I'm thinking they are fast approaching the point where anyone, but the most discerning user, won't be able to tell the difference in visual quality anymore.

There are limits to the amount of details that the human eye and brain can process.

I agree with everyone paying a low fee for bandwidth used (no unlimited) to benefit those who don't use the network a lot, at least until the point where everybody can use their allotted bandwidth 24/7 and the network can support it.

However, I don't agree with companies that provide the infrastructure finding ways to profit from side gimmicks.

Whenever hardware companies muscle-in on the software side of business, the end-user never benefits.

Let the network owners charge you for "the pipe" at whatever price they need to turn up a profit and let it be the end of it.

Vsauce covered this; I think he said 7Mega pixels in the center 25% of the screen, and 2Mega pixels everywhere else. 4k resolutions probably would reach that limitation with little problem if used properly.