Ever wanted to be a PC gamer, but didn’t want to buy a gaming PC? NVIDIA’s Jen-Hsun Haung wants your number. Taking the stage at CES today, NVIDIA’s CEO announced GeForce Now for PC and Mac — an offshoot of its cloud gaming service aimed at prospective PC gamers. Despite sharing the same name as the streaming service it offers to NVIDIA Shield users, GeForce Now for PC isn’t a gaming subscription service. It’s a server rental program. Users of GeForce Now for PC won’t load up a streaming app and pick through a list of games — they’ll load up Steam, Origin, UPlay or other PC game providers and purchase games directly from the distributor. Then they’ll run that game on NVIDIA’s GRID servers through GeForce Now for an hourly fee. The result is a setup that, in the stage demo, looks remarkably like running games on a local machine. The idea seems neat, but offloading your gameplay to the cloud isn’t cheap: NVIDIA says GeForce Now will charge $25 for 20 hours of play, and that doesn’t include the cost of the games. If you only played two hours a day, you’d spend $912 for a year of NVIDIA GeForce Now gaming. Still, if you really don’t want to buy a gaming machine with that cash, GeForce Now for PC and Mac will start rolling out in March.
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NVIDIA brings GeForce Now cloud gaming to Mac and PC
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darthcamaro writes “At the Linuxcon conference in New Orleans today, Linus Torvalds joined fellow kernel developers in answering a barrage of questions about Linux development. One question he was asked was whether a government agency had ever asked about inserting a back-door into Linux. Torvalds responded ‘no’ while shaking his head ‘yes, ‘ as the audience broke into spontaneous laughter. Torvalds also admitted that while he as a full life outside of Linux he couldn’t imagine his life without it. ‘I don’t see any project coming along being more interesting to me than Linux, ‘ Torvalds said. ‘I couldn’t imagine filling the void in my life if I didn’t have Linux.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.