How Mozilla and OTOY Have Made the PlayStation 4 Obsolete

I am unreasonably wary of cloud systems, a process by which information is stored online in order to be more easily accessible to the users. It allows for greater flexibility, perhaps, but you should still be wary of outages, of being spied upon, and of being shackled to a single internet service for your storage. It’s generally better to back up your stuff on a hard drive than rely on someone else. It’s not wrong to use the cloud, but at the moment it is sub-optimal, especially if you have a spotty internet connection. In theory, cloud storage is supposed to be a giant farm of servers where if one goes down, there’s thousands of others to take its place. They tell you that cloud services are always available but they go down anyway, in a big way . Amazon, Google, and many other sites have cloud systems (most visibly to consumers for backup up files or hosting websites) and there are a couple others who want a piece of that pie before it gets bigger.

Despite my gripes, there are things you can potentially do with cloud systems that you couldn’t otherwise. Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 4 console will not be able to play games from previous systems –not out of the box, anyway. Instead, they have promised to provide a service (the exact details are unknown at this time) in which their computers (in the cloud!) will run the old games and pump the audio/video to you, responding to your inputs as if you were playing it running right on your machine normally. Since it’s Sony running it, it will probably be an laggy, artifacted mess if it doesn’t in fact turn out to be just a complete pack of lies. (Maybe it can finally run Toy Story in real time. If not, Netflix already can.) Depending on your connection quality, playing PlayStation 1-3 games on your PlayStation 4 might look like you’re playing 1992′s Sewer Shark. This is the reality of streaming video today, but you’re not going to hear that, you’re going to hear about how great it is. You won’t know until you’ve bought a PS4. Sony is about as caring as malaria and as trustworthy as a politician without a gun to his head.

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