Slashdot Mirror

Relive the magic: Temple of Asphai Trilogy. Just follow some of the directions here, and you should be on your way.

I can already see some manager wondering who got their hands on it -- a competitor? 2600 or LoD -- aren't they based in the east coast, possibly New York? Then thoughts shift to what this will do when management hears about this: have we just committed a "career-limiting act"?

There's probably always been a kind of siege mentality at Microsoft. I'm sure that this has only intensified with the recent finding of fact by Judge Jackson, BackOrifice 2000, the spotlight that Linux took from Windows and all the general ill will towards the company. Couple that with the human tendency to assume that something that's gone missing has been stolen (especially if that something is valuable), and you have a recipe for paranoia. Except that paranoia is the mistaken impression that people are out to get you.

In the end, they assumed theft-by-scam, for which it would have been justified to call the cops. Since it wasn't the case, it's yet more egg on Microsoft's face, and you can allow yourself a little schadenfreude and know that somewhere inside 1 Microsoft Way, someone is getting the riot act read to them.

This gives the manufacturer a monopoly in their platform and then the best software will be developed for that platform, it'd be great if an open standard could be defined for game consoles that all consoles could be based upon. That would make it easy to make games that would work on all platforms and would give the user a choice in which platform to buy. Of course there's problems in this idea but there does need to be some openness in the game consoles or we'll get another Microsoft type situation.

linuxci rightly points out that there are problems with the open-console idea. The foremost among these, it seems to me, is that once a standard console architecture is defined the market is solely differentiated by price. Since that is a recipe for declining profit margins, the manufacturers will immediately look for other ways to differentiate their products. This differentiation will lead to incompatibilities between machines that claim to follow the same standard. Once again, the user is back in the "what hardware, add-ons, components do I need to play this game" mode.

This reasoning brings to mind several questions:

1. Does a single manufacturer need to control the hardware and APIs for a particular console in order to ensure compatibility?
2. Should the open-source community work on an open-source game console kernel and hardware specification?
3. Do we all need to buy one of each type of game console to make sure all the manufacturers stay in business?

I attended a lecture recently by Kevin Nielsen of Newmonics. They are developing a real-time Java for embedded systems. He presented data on the number of computers with which the average person interacts on a daily basis. The current number is in the 30-50 range; there are 8-12 computers in a new car. They are projecting the total number of daily computer-individual interactions to climb to over 200 in the next 5 years. We will still have PCs on our desks, but they will be everywhere else as well.