Found this tidbit on BluesNews this morning:
http://www.dperry.com/archives/news/...aikai_-_video/
Gakai is a cloud-based PC gaming service announced earlier this year.
This looks promising, although I can't see the appeal of playing Need for Speed in a browser window. Maybe it's just me.
Granted, I still see little or no application for cloud-based setups for the car. However, by using a system like Gaikai to run real-world apps across real-world 'net connections with nothing more than a browser, it could certainly open up a wealth of functionality, as long as there's a 'net connection present.
A few items of note, straight from the front page of Dave Perry's blog:
(1) No installing anything. (I'm running regular Windows Vista, with the latest Firefox and Flash is installed.)
(2) This is a low-spec server, it's a very custom configuration, fully virtualized. Why? To keep the costs to an absolute minimum. We had 7 Call of Duty games running on our E3 demo server recently.
(3) Data travel distance is around 800 miles (round trip) on this demo as that's where the server is. I get a 21 millisecond ping on that route. My final delay will be 10 milliseconds as I just added a server in Irvine California yesterday, but it's not added to our grid yet. (So this demo is twice the delay I personally would get, the good news is I don't notice it anyway.)
(4) This server is not hosted by a Tier 1 provider, just a regular Data Center in Freemont California. Also, I'm not cheating and using fiber connections for our demos. This is a home cable connection in a home.
(5) We don't claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn't take 7 years, and we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips. As you can see, we don't need them, and so our costs will be much less. 
(6) We designed this for the real internet. The video compression codecs change in realtime based on the need of the application (or game), and based on the hardware & bandwidth you have. (For Photoshop we make sure it's pixel perfect.)
(7) Our bandwidth is mostly sub 1 megabit across all games. (Works with Wifi, works on netbooks with no 3D card etc.)
(8) If you hear any clicks, they are coming from my wireless headset microphone. I won't use that next time I promise. 
(9) I made a few video cuts using Windows Movie maker to cut out dead air. Like Need for Speed has far to many menus with loads & delays between them. So I tried to keep the pace up so you see plenty of demos
(10) I keep getting asked what operating system we use. We are completely OS agnostic, some demos come from Linux, some come from Windows and will ultimately support streaming from MAC servers too.
Linear Mode
