demon

It's a bit unfair for Adobe to whine about being "cut out of the loop" on MacOS X (or any other platform) right now. They can't be bothered to implement the full acceleration features on other platforms, moaning about how it "can't be done", and conveniently ignoring the people who tell them "erm, of course it can, do [this]". Adobe needs to listen to people who know things (I'm not saying I'm one of them, but there are people who do), instead of whining about how the things they supposedly need "can't be done".

@Flacofromny23: You do understand that OpenGL ES, not OpenGL, is used on devices like the iPhone? As pointed out above, there may yet be an OpenGL ES 2.1 or something that rolls in some of the new stuff from OpenGL 4.0, but it's not the same thing.

Actually no; sort of looks like Bowie, but it's actually a guy named Michael Sheen. I guess he was David Frost in "Frost/Nixon" (at least, so says ImDB). Definitely channeling a Bowie vibe though...

But if you have an old 400 MHz machine, it's not going to be able to decode 720p video - you'll be lucky if it can play a YouTube video smoothly, and there's no way you'd be able to see what's going on in a modern game if it's downscaled to that resolution. So you'd have to upgrade your machine anyway, whether you're using OnLive or playing the game on your own hardware. Not as much, of course, but if you're not willing to upgrade the hardware enough to play Crysis Warhead, why would you upgrade enough to play OnLive, then have to pay its $15 monthly fee, and still have to buy/rent games on top of that?

As others have mentioned, I smell FAIL.

Well, also there's the fact that a machine that old probably isn't going to be able to play back 720p video at full framerate - even recent inexpensive netbooks can't unless they have some pretty decent graphics hardware with full codec offloading. Sure, you could opt for 360p or some lower resolution, but how are you going to see jack in your game that way? And that assumes that they're using a standardized codec, like H.264 or VC1, that has hardware ASIC decoder options - if it's a custom software-only codec, you'll need a fairly meaty machine just to play your OnLive games at all.

How was this supposed to be a solution for people who have old machines, again?

Of course it won't. That's why they have to have huge datacenters, and have them relatively close network-wise to your location, for the beta players (and probably for the final users as well). Even then, whatever happened to their mother-of-all-video-codecs that could magically optimally encode frames in a fixed period? And I can't imagine the hardware they'll need to support this sort of thing is going to be under constant expansion; they'd bankrupt themselves before long, so they'll only be able to take on so many customers for awhile.

That combined with $15/month + buying/renting individual titles... assuming the performance is even decent (and I think that's a big "if"), people will be hard pressed to find this worthwhile. With both major leading-edge consoles available for $299 at retail, I just can't see how this works out to be a better deal. Too many potential problems, too many points of failure, and not enough payoff.

@Wag: Well, if you like a DVR that works, you might want to consider it. I've not heard anything positive about Verizon's FiOS DVR. The software is slightly better than what most cablecos use, but it's still too slow, and the boxes are too flaky. This seems to be a theme across most provider boxes.

@aubreyq: 150 hours of HD on a what, 320 GB or 500 GB drive? Don't think so. Also, that DirecTV box is partly subsidized by DirecTV - and you don't own it either (no seriously, check the fine print - that's a long term lease, if you cancel service it still belongs to DirecTV).

Is TiVo cheap? No, I can safely say it isn't. However, I still think it's better than just about anything else out there. My Series3 is still going strong, after over 3 years - you can pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

@nickff: My understanding is that the new DirecTiVo is not going to be running on TiVo hardware, but it's going to be TiVo software running on a new DVR hardware platform from D* (HR24? HR30?) where the customer can choose to run either D*'s own DVR software, or the TiVo stuff. This is totally separate from that. It'll be good to see DirecTV+TiVo again though (hopefully).

@gdgtr: If it was going to do tru2way we'd probably have heard about it; also, since tru2way deployments still haven't expanded beyond 3-4 major cities, I'm guessing no. And no, it's not going to do satellite; blame D* for not bothering with standards, and E* for bastardizing DVB-S beyond recognition - and both of them for not wanting to play nice with others.