Slashdot Mirror
Anonymous Will Award $200,000 for Xbox Linux
An anonymous reader writes: "The X-box Linux Project at Sourceforge reports today that an anonymous donor will award nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the individuals responsible for the completion of a two-phased effort to run Linux on the Xbox. One can't help but wonder if this will help or hurt the community. On one hand, it is likely to generate additional interest in the project, on the other, some people may be less inclinded to share their discoveries with money on the line.
Then again, getting both Money and Glory sounds pretty good."
I pay you $50 to get Linux running on my TRS-80
The basic goal of the project is to find a simple and completely legal way to run Linux on the Microsoft Xbox.
Yes, and the basic goal of the MS XBox team will be to find any way possible to prevent it.
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
Two hundred g's??? if only i could afford the 200 hundred bucks for an xbox.....damn college. :)
That's a really weird way of saying $200,000: "nearly a quarter of a million dollar"
/me wonders why they're annonymous?
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
I bet its Billy G putting up the money because he knowns it can't be done. Either that or he wants to play xbill on his xbox.
-- OMFG = Oh My Floatse Goatse
Are you allowed to perform hardware modifications or is this merely a software thing. I would think that a mod chip is probably at least needed to get past micro$oft's test of palladium.
.sig, what's that?
There's no sig like SIGSEG
is $200,000 going to be enough for legal expenses when you accept the prize and Microsoft comes at you with all their legal guns ablazing?
xavii aka bob
If only I could get $100,000 for breaking into a default Redhat or Win9x install, I'd be a millionaire by now!
Actually if you read the rules the have the share their findings to get the money.
Second, assuming someone succeeds, a large cash infusion has proved to be the downfall of many Linux companies. Roger Stallman was right, money is the "root" (ha!) of all evil, just look at companies like RedHat and VA Linux Something.
Third, even if they succeed and no one is killed in the process, what possible use could Linux be on an XBox? I heard they use some kind of proprietary game format that Linux won't be able to read anyway. "DVD" or something.
If it wasn't anonymous, I would say it was Larry Ellison. He's known for stunts like this, but usually he does everything he can to pull his name into it. Of course, if it wasn't anonymous, we'd know who it was anyway.
I bet's it's just some geek who got lucky and sold his stock before everything went bust.
Although, consider the option of someone looking to take advantage of MS's deep loss on each of these things and build a giant cluster at a fraction of the market price.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
This will be the only Linux implementation with support for DirectX, since I doubt the NV25 graphics chip has any support for OpenGL or its ilk. Won't that be interesting?
the anonymous donor, obviously Bill Gates. Now who is least likely to buy X-Boxes? Linux users/MS haters.... and now who will be snatching them up? Linux users who want 200 thousand dollars. And at the next meeting with game companies, they have a much larger apparent user base.... And it's all pointless, the 'legal' makes it impossible, I'm sure somewhere in the EULA for the X-Box it says 'by purchasing this product you agree to never ever run linux on it or else you will forfeit all your money and your first born child.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I have a Xbox ready to hack. Anyone want to join in NorthernCali. Let me know.
... if he/she purchased 1000 XBoxes and used them for something that would normally require a $400 Intel based computer.
Xboxes are are priced at $200, but really contain the guts of a typical $450 PC.
A cluster of 1000 Xboxes would be mighty cheap computing power.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Okay $200k is a hell of a lot; and we all know that MS loses money on every X-Box sale. A viable alternative development platform would hurt MS. This means it's somebody well-established (rich!) in the industry with a score to settle with Microsoft? Or a games company that wants to open up development for what I understand is a cheap PC platform without paying MS tax? Maybe even a potential coup by Sony or Nintendo? Completely intriguing; maybe we could have a sweepstake on who we think this anonymous donor is...
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
maybe this is a firmware competitor? maybe next year sony releases an x-box OS based on linux with lots of whiz-bang features to try to get people to switch.
sure, i might be reaching but it's still possible...
$200,000 from him if you can run linux on it, but them MS will probably pay you $400,000 to keep it hush.
Yeah.. sure they will
Having Mandrake 8.2 running on the XBox would be *great* !!
Right now, "underground" work on consoles is fairly open. Whenever "closed" hardware and firmware gets reverse-engineered, the results are typically documented and shared among like-minded developers. Won't the $200K reward encourage greedy developers to hide their work and end up reducing the amount of sharing that goes on? In the end, this would hinder efforts to open up the Xbox. I wouldn't be suprised if MS was behind this "reward" :)
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
sigh... i guess 1/5 of a million dollars just don't have that "zing" or "cha-chin!" to it...
hell... this is why we have enron scandals... 50 grand short and we are calling it "nearly"
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Microsoft is just doing this to flush out all the good console hackers so they can hire/enslave them for their X-Box2 project.
Josh Winslow
Can we get this in writing?
I'd like to see that cash in escrow before I believed anything this "anonymous" donor said.
With an Xbox at $199, a bewolf Linux cluster of a truckload of these could be a huge slap in the face to Microsoft. Forget the cluster, the XBox with custom software I am sure could make some rockin broadcast quality graphics for next to nothing.
This anonymous thing could just be a big ploy to get even more publicity when the generous person or company is revealed. I was posting earier this might be Larry Ellison, if it were not anonymous...it's his style, but I would expect the money to be more. It could be him, and want the more publicity angle.
It could also be to shield the person from legal attack until after the goose is already cooked, so to speak.
-Pete
(above amazon link is an affiliate link...for full discloseure)
Soccer Goal Plans
And someone wanted to convince me that there is no money to be made with free software.
To Boost XFlop sales. Too bad nobody outside the Mickysoft Xbox FanClub gives a damn about anything XFlop.
All it takes are 4 dedicated (laid off?) people,
an assurance of anonymity( for probably the reasons the donor is anonymous) and in that same spirit of anonymity payment in cash.
(Oh, if the IRS is the donor the agreement if void).
Hmm, Linux on a Microsoft console? Now THAT'S irony at it's finest. I say let's do it. :)
What's next, the Freestyle thingy they've always talked about?
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steve Wright
Maybe its the Chinese gov, and they want to use Xbox's with Linux. The Chinese invented Linux after all (yes, that was a joke).
Oh well... Guess I'll go buy a PowerBook.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Just think, a kinder, gentler Halo.
Is that like... $200,000USD? I'm in Canada! I could be a billionaire!!!!
This doesnt seem in any way anti-linux nor an impossible feat. Its most likely MS funded, since who else would care $200,000 worth whether or not Linux can be ported to Xbox. But instead of hoping its not possible, I think its MS hoping it is, so that they can say we can do everything a PS2 could do. Not to mention, $200,000 to a single person or group, for a finished working version of Linux under Xbox is fairly cheap, if they [MS] hired Linux consultants to do that it would probably cost more.
Note that the reward isn't all-or-nothing - it's partitioned into five distinct tasks, in two separate porjects. That also means that different people can claim the prize money for each task. If two groups solve the same problem, the "better" solution gets all the money.
Project A:
Task 1: Replacement BIOS - $55,000
Task 2: Kernel and XFree drivers
- 25,000
Task 3: Kernel logic: FATX and miscellaneous - 10,000
Task 4: XBE bootloader $10,000
Project B:
Run unsigned code on an Xbox without any hardware modification - $100,000
who is this masked marvel? and where does he get this kind of money? and why is he such a troll?
So, Mr. Gilmore (I'd say that the odds are pretty good that he's the anonymous donor) will not only have wasted his money but will have hurt the cause of Linux. That's fine by me, since I (like many others) believe that propagating the GPL and GPLed software is a bad idea. But it'll disappoint even advocates of Linux when it happens.
This is just some speculation on my part. But let's face it, it does make a little sense.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Nice tps12 Impersonation.
The fine folks at Indrema pooled all the VC money they hid in the closet. A set-top Linux-based game console will come at last!
Or somthing. Maby I'm still bitter 'cause I bought an Atari Jaguar.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
In light of the slick ps2linux kit (which for me, works great) where's the huge market in Xbox Linux?
There's a lot more ps2's out there and I don't see Sony going after what would have to be a $5mil market to make paying $200K worth it.
With the Sony kit, you drop 200 bucks and Akio's your uncle. And it's even without the obvious market delays that the M$ lawyers would bring.
But it's not exactly a hot item for Sony. Very, very niche sales numbers.
Maybe back a few years ago when money didn't care where it went, $200k was no big thing, but today?
Why the fuss? Because it's a x86?
I smell a fish.
Who stands to make money from Linux being ported to the Xbox?
1) M$ would sell lots more Xboxen,
2) more people are likely to subscribe to the M$ games channel (or whatever you call it).
3) M$ could make money from the XBE developer licenses (I'm afraid I speak from ignorance here--this may not be the case.)
Since the anonymous donor seems to be so worried about the legality of the code, I seriously doubt that it is a hidden ploy by M$, thus I think that the potential downside must be more than that.
Q) Who else stands to gain money by Linux being ported to the Xbox? (Why would somebody be willing to spend $200,000 on this?)
A) Someone who is going to spend the money one way or another anyway, who is interested in some other revenue stream which will come from the Xbox.
Sony comes to mind, but not to the top of the list. They make money on their own hardware. They would really have no interest in making the Xbox a more attractive platform n any way.
A PVR or alternate service provider who want to use the platform for another purpose than gaming is a possibility, but not the top of the list again--why bother to get games going if you're just trying to sell a TV service?
What about a Linux O/S vendor? Red Hat, for example, could benefit from having a consumer platform which could run "their" software. Their recent game plan involves server software and consulting--I think they are not pursuing a mass-market approach.
A game vendor strikes me as being the likely candidate. One that already writes GNU/Linux games, and wants to broaden their reach to the Xbox, but doesn't want to be under M$'s thumb. They would have t write this code anyway, and their own IP would not be compromised. Anyone want to take a guess here? Who is the leader in this arena?
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
Instead of Microsoft preventing this, they may want to quietly encourage this. If you look at it from the marketing standpoint, once this gets developed, it will most certainly boost Xbox (or as I call it, suXbox) sales to us nerds who want to install Linux on it.
/.
Although if the rumors are true and they lose a buttload of money on it, maybe they'll get extra game sales or even get some new game developers
I can just picture everybody racing to get the first "Web server run from Xbox!" headline on
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
I knew I could count on Slashdot to provide pedantry on a tiny detail in the face of a totally meaning-free post!
no one wants this crap. spend your time writing a better GUI for linux and make some decent fonts, learn how to render them CORRECTLY and then port linux to the xbox.
turd wads.
Cause I could probably do that.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Most PC's are solid machines running a crappy/faulty OS (Any flavor of an MS Product you'd like.) Now, the goal is to present the opposite, take a solid operating system and put it on a crappy/faulty machine? I guess the worst part is, someone wants to fork over a large chunk of change just for this 'miracle'? That's just plain nutty.
Anyways, back to setting up my Dreamcast as a webserver. =)
======
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. - Euripides
This is an award in the amount of X dollars to anyone who can post a story like this one and not have another post on /. the next day saying MS shut it down.
I know i know, far fetched consipracy theory -- but at least hear me out here:
first of all -- why did SONY release a linux kit? I mean, people might say "oh yeah there is a community for it" or "there is a demand for it." i disagree. we know that SONY makes no money on the kits -- they don't expect to sell that many, definitely not enough to recover the man-hours poured into it; so even if the kit itself, hardware wise, makes them a few bux, overall it's a losing proposition. especially considering it's a custom chip, so that's a LOT of coding and debugging to get the thing working.
however, what it DOES do is on all fronts kill any reason you might have to own a mod chip. i mean, every argument you throw their way withers away when there is a linux kit. you want to do home-brew software? sure -- get a linux kit. you want to learn how PS2 works b/c you are a enthusiest (sp?) ? -- get a linux kit. etc etc. From now on, whenever they crack down on mod chip suppliers, we as consumers will have no argument toward them, morally or in court, because all the legitimate uses of the mod chip has been covered already.
now back to M$. we know M$ loses more money per box than sony on the consoles. and when the mod chip business REALLY opens up (like for the PS1), oh boy will we see some profit figures bleed. They are already starting to legally crack down on mod-chip teams, and before they go-to court, it would be really nice for them to have some arguments (like sony above) lined up.
to do this "contest" thing would cost them chump change (200k max) -- versus getting their highly compensated programmers on this -- most probabbly knows little in the ways of LINUX anyhow. note the last part said "no hardware mods"... hmmmm....
again, just conspiracy theory here; but you have to admit -- there might be some very valid reason M$ would want to do this.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
He's still pissed about the whole GUI thing... Is that funny to everyone, or just me?
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
i wonder WHO would give someone $200,000 to crack the MICROSOFT xbox that has MONEY, and an INTEREST IN THE XBOX... maybe HE wants to build a better xbox2 ?
Runnin' On Empty
Watch it turn out to be Microsoft so they can try to bust you for copyright infringement or something.
But then my buddy Steve put in another 100k.
Good luck,
Larry E.
The whole project is divided into two sub-projects, the first one consisting of four tasks.
Project A: Porting Linux to a modified Xbox:
Task 1: Replacement BIOS (software/hardware)
Task 2: Kernel and XFree drivers
Task 3: Kernel logic: FATX and miscellaneous
Task 4: XBE bootloader
Project B: Xbox hack without any hardware modification
A total of US$ 100,000 will be awarded for the completion of each of the two projects.
Well, I hope someone can do this, it would be very interesting to see, but I don't get how they can do all of this 'legally' as the anonymous donor wishes. To complete project b, are going to need to find out how the Digital Rights Management (tm) system works on the Xbox, and that would violate the DMCA as far as I know, but im no lawyer. I hope they clear that up soon, unless they expect this person to deal with microsoft lawyers to license DRM somehow, but i doubt they can if they have to disclose the reason why they want to license the technology.
Best of luck to all those capable of doing this though.
Don't repeat it, but the anonymous is Steve Ballmers... to sell more XBox!!!
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
I'm sure there are people at MS who know enough about the device to do this. And since they probably make $45k a year plus stock options (which are in the toilet right now), there's probably a high probability that an MS developer is going to claim some of that cash, especially if he's able to remain anonymous.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
$200,000 dollars?
For that price you could buy 8 human lives!
They must be getting desperate.
It's a fifth of a million. Why in the world
would you write "almost a quarter million"
when "fifth of a million" is shorter, more
precise, and makes you sound slightly more
intelligent?
This person hasn't heard of RentACoder.com. Ex silicon valley
hackers have relocated to Bangalore India and are now taking massive devlopment projects for 65 cents.
I have been monitoring the site for quite a while, I want someone to port my
classic DOOMs to the PDA and no one showed up to take the job except for some
newbie called jcarmack. I will probably pay him the 70 cents he is asking for
just to give him a shot, no one else shows up.
And yes, my fur carpet is 100% coder skin, we hunted that from Java-ONE.
It's Larry Ellison...He's already been through a load of garbage from Microsoft once in his life, why stop now?
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
but neither of you was even slightly funny.
Lindows OS on an XBOX.. its all clear now
An anonymous donor is going to give up $200,000 to hack up the X-Box and put Linux on it, something which in my opinion can provide no financial return no matter which way you look at it.
Such a hack is so geared towards the geek crowd that there's no way it could serve to sell significantly more X-Boxes. This story is smoke and mirrors, and the only way I would believe it is if this $200K was placed in escrow and could be verified by any parties wishing to participate. If you believe this, I've got some prime real estate in Florida I would like to sell to you. Dirt cheap.
-R
Because Microsoft can't figure out any other way to get the geeks to buy their trashware. So, dangle a carrot (200k), offer a technical challenge and boom 5000 or so units sell to would-be hackers. Billy laughs all the way to the bank. I'm just wondering how many new Xboxen will be sold because of this "challenge".
s/challenge/waste of time/;
No, I don't have any proof, just do like any good cop would. Follow that money! I'm sure if this is the case, the Xbox/Linux group most likely doesn't know where its really comming from.
They supply a nice FAQ and roadmap. You can even check the current status of the project.
A short precis:
o The money is awarded for completion of specific roadmap tasks, by a committee. The work must be contributed through the sourceforge project.
o The FAQ contains various imprecations about using the Xbox SDK or knowledge under NDA, and encouragement to share work and reverse engineering knowledge, indicating that playing nice is more likely to earn credit. There's also a reminder about the GPL. The solution is supposed to be legal (with a few IANALs thrown in for good measure).
o Don't rely on my comprehension skills this early in the day. I haven't even had coffee yet. Go read.
Wyrd, dude.
...the contest wasn't to get Linux running on a Playstation 2...
And as soon as you submit your code, you see it on KaZaa the next day with the file description, "The check is in the mail"...
Retard? Maybe.
Greasy magic playing, buffy the vampire slayer watching nerdboy? Definitely not.
I hope high gas prices are depriving your children, you fucking dumbass.
Bill Gates.
It's a great marketing ploy....
get all linux hax0rz to break your strongest copy protections,
learn how they did it, and plug the holes so they can't break the next gen....
Plus, they sell a shit load of xboxes to otherwise anti-MS people....
...an employee at Microsoft.
:)
details are at...hmm, should I?
A cluster of 1000 Xboxes would be mighty cheap computing power.
I'm too lazy to actually calculate this, but I have to wonder about the $$ feasibility of an XBox cluster. Okay, I could believe it's a better value to hack an XBox than to buy a PC for gaming, if you don't take future upgrades into account. (GeForce 6's and Radeon 12000's probably won't have a USB or ethernet interface; just a guess.)
But if you want to make the ubiquitous Beowulf cluster of XBoxen to crunch numbers, is it really more cost effective? Even if someone figures out how to put Linux on there without a hardware mod, you need to consider that the graphics and sound capabilities built-in won't be used in the cluster.
Don't compare an XBox cluster to a cluster of Linux gaming machines but to a cluster of bare-bones dual-cpu boxen or rackmount servers with no or minimal video, sound and i/o capability. Plus compare the power consumption, cooling and space requrements of the two since this becomes nontrivial with a cluster.
Plus, who with such high number-crunching needs would put up with the dearth of hardware support for Linux on XBox. You can't just swap out a motherboard, power supply or ethernet card on those puppies, at least not as easily as a desktop, tower or rack PC.
I don't think an XBox cluster is reasonably feasible beyond the geek in me saying "that's so cool that someone did that!" However for us Linux geeks and gamers I'd love to have Linux on XBoxes. (Not necessarily to own one, before you Linux Dreamcasters jump on me.)
Its probably someone that wants to hurt Microsoft's Secure PC plans by showing the world that the Emperor has no clothes. There is a lot more than $5 mil at stake in that arena.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Athlon XP 2000 - 150$
Cheap mobo with etherent 100$
128MB DDR SDRAM - 25$
Case and PSU - 50$
8GB HDD - 75$
----------
Total 400$
Yep, it's twice as expensive. But in a clusternode it's usually the the CPU that counts and XP2000 is 2-3 times faster than what is in an X-Box. A cluster node doesn't need a DVD drive or a top of the line Gforce4. You may not even need the harddistk. With 200,000$ you can get 500 nodes like this, or a linux distribution that boots on X-Box - but you still need to buy the 1000 X-Boxen to run that distro for another 200,000$. And of course 6 months from now the the Athlon config will be ~50$ cheaper, while the X-Box is steady at 200$.
Legal fees: $20,000
XBox: $200
Porting reward: $200,000
Look on Gates' face when you complete it... priceless.
...entirely sure I understand why you say that they lose 200$ per unit? Perhaps you could clearify? Is that how much it costs for them to build the things?
I bet that any Microsoft dev with knowledge of the BIOS would find these tasks trivial. Place $200K in front of one of the devs, and it'd be interesting whether they may "creatively" find ways to solve all these tasks.
There's no reward. None. There can't be. Tell me, how do I contact this anonymous person to claim my reward? He conveniently forgot to leave a return address. Wait, I get it, he's only withholding his name untill it is developed so that he can avoid trouble untill the cat is out of the bag! Yeah! There actually is someone with enough time in the day to surf the ENTIRE INTERNET looking for the person who did it!
/. people ever get these kind of emails? What do you do when you get that email?
I would suggest that it was the people already working on the project trying to drum up additional interest in their project. But why, considering that the project is already recieving tons of attention?
Answer: Some random troll trying to create a story. Come on, don't you
SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0
0 rows returned
...given Sun's dedication to making life hard for Microsoft at any price. $200k will be a lot cheaper than StarOffice was, and will be hit-for-hit value against MS when only about the 3000th Linuxified XBox hits the streets, given how much MS are losing on each one.
They'd make Xcellent LTSP terminals, with splendid graphics and more than enough RAM. You'd need to pay for a mouse, keyboard and mod chip for each, but they'd still be cheap.
And since `Linux is for people who hate Microsoft,' the value in unhelping MS with each sale can't be overlooked. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
<bad_russian_accent>
I have heard of this Linux. It was inwented by russian, no?
</bad_russian_accent>
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Sony, because of the nature of their hardware, is much less vulnerable than microsoft here. (It might also be nintendo.)
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
So, if this is kept as a reward, then it falls into a 55% tax bracket, if my memory is correct.
How about turning it into a contract effort, with the money falling into a much lower (~30-35% max) bracket.
Also does it make you just a little nervous that the donor wishes to remain anonymous. Is that so you're the only one on the hook come lawsuit time?
I've had Mandrake 8.2 running perfectly happy on, oddly enough, a Dell 8100 _and_ a Dell 7500. I didn't have use for IR, but the code _is_ in there. The 8100 was deleriously happy playing 3D games, but the built-in speakers, as you might expect, aren't much chop.
Conclusion: the original poster is a troll. Can we moderate him down to -5, clueless wonder?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
We all know who that anonymous doner is and $200k is pocket change to him. He just wants to see it fail all the while getting the Linux people interested in the x-box. Fuck the x-box. Don't buy one. Show no interest in it if your clueless friends have one. And if you see on in the store's and you can reach the controller plugs, fuck with the pins so they don't work.
...the girlfriend's dad with the sense of humour.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's a plot, just not directed against the evil empire.
Logic follows:
We all know and love those cute little 'bedside' servers from Shuttle. Based on my calculations, the ideal server costs around $1G using their solution (cool case, 2Ghz athalon, 1Gb ram, 120Gb hd, etc.). Of course, it costs more when you add the Linux tax, but we've all been complaining about that for ages.
Now, with a new solution from the dark side just around the corner due to this new incentive, Shuttle is going to go out of business! So it's clearly a plot... by Microsoft!
I mean, if I could have a five computer farm for just $1G, I'd buy five. Then I could have my own 5x5, think of the possibilities.
Don't do it folks, just because we have all been assimilated doesn't mean we don't have free will. Clearly, the only way to save this fine company is to crack down on those damn OS's. SAVE SHUTTLE, DON'T USE LINUX!
End "logic"
For $200,000, I could buy 6,000 transcripts of Nightline.
I would love to have a cheap, standard and capable hardware platform to distribute hobby games and graphics demos.
No more guessing at videocard/cpu/memory/os capabilities and performance. No more code fallbacks. No more unreproducable bugs on your own hardware. Just the fun parts of coding.
Not to mention the killer app of music/video streaming and/or playback. Unified memory + Geforce3 = Best Winamp Visualization Ever!
I can easily see a rich techno-geek with only the best of intentions putting up the cash.
I'd rather see FreeBSD on it, I wonder if that
would be worth any money.
'Coz I can do it the other way around fairly easily...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm not a betting man, but...
I should buy one now and *hope* someone succeeds in porting Linux to it OR wait until it happens and *hope* MS hasn't raised the prices by then?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Since Linux for XBOX isn't going to run without defeating Microsoft's security one way or another, you're talking about a DMCA infraction for which the $200k donor becomes an an accomplice, at the very least...
I predict some bumps in the road of this plan!
Ask yourself: How much better would the world be if the person funding this instead sent the whole $200K to a reputable charity to help feed, clothe, house, or medically treat poor people or natural disaster victims? It wouldn't save the world, but it would make a hell of lot more difference than funding yet another fucking LInux distro.
Sorry, I'm sounding pissy again. I suppose I should shut down my browser and go do something productive.
how about a large US state school system, or some other country's national system? .... this would not only get them out from under the BSA/M$ threat but save them big bucks on both hardware and software long-term
Uhhh -- Sony's boxes already run Linux and sell at less than a profit.
>Sony, because of the nature of their hardware, is much less vulnerable than microsoft here.
Sony, because their PS2 has been hacked to bits, has already lost all there is to lose anyways.
sigs are a waste of space
2. After we know where, how is it determined to actually be legal. Wouldn't it take a court ruling to be sure. If it isn't obviously legal, could they be taken to court. Nearly anything can be put under scrutiny by the DMCA that is an attempt to circumvent access controls. Short of a court order that it is legal, you've only got a lawyers opinion. I know that they have the right spirit, but this looks like it could come down to a lot of stupid arguments.
With microsofts security background it may be easier just to crack the network interface and root the box. Then down load the image and run that way.
This would not qualify for B as a cd boot is required.
Of course if this was easy someone would build a worm and upgrade 10k boxes one evening
I think Slashdot did this prank so they would have something interesting and unique to have us talk about instead of just crapy MS sucks stories.
:)
Bill Gates is the donor. He will pay you for your ideas, then keep them tucked away in his Intellectual Properties and NEVER release them to the consumer.
Sounds like a faulty OS. The BSDs handle the tulip cards, no problem.
You just solved the riddle.
Y'know, it sounds a lot like something Larry Ellison would do. Not because he'd stand to benefit from any success, but more likely just because it would irritate Gates. After all, these people dig around in each others' garbage, for pete's sake. They're not in it for the money anymore, they're in it for the game.
It's a game. It's just a game. And this stunt is not much more than the infield heckling the batter in a ball game.
This project sounds more along the lines of a NetBSD project than a linux project. With 40 plus platforms able to run NetBSD, NetBSD runs on everything. Hell, i'd be surprised if they haven't secretly begun work on it already.
Well, I can tell you that wireless does work fine on my Inspiron 8100. Do a little Googling or better yet go to www.linuxquestions.org and search for hermes.conf Also, wireless tools should be included by default on a Redhat 7.3 install. Try searching for the mysteries of iwconfig. It's not your GUI "new wireless connection" button but it does seem to do the trick since it's working for me right now. Seriously, this hermes.conf fix has been around for a long time.
THIS again? I've got karma to burn so why not. He who writes the code chooses the license. Get over it. Don't like GPLed code? Don't use it. There are strings attached to commercial SDKs and libraries that are far more obnoxious than the GPL. And I don't see you charging any of Microsoft's windmills.
Most of us here are fully capable of seeing when the GPL is appropriate and when it isn't. For that matter, many of us don't give a crap about RMS' polemics either. The GPL is an often useful tool. Yes it is for some people. Get over it. The last time I checked, I didn't start hemorraging internally the last time I fired up a shell linked against readline. So much for the viral thing.
And no whinging about how it hurts somebody's development business. That is sooo annoying. Any idiot who can't be bothered to read COPYING should be canned anyway. You want the functionality of some GPLed code? Don't like the terms? Tough. Find or write a replacement. This is no worse than the terms on the commercial code you seem so concerned about.
Oh yeah, in case anybody missed it. Not all GPLed code is owned or controlled by the FSF. The GPL lends itself to agendas other than theirs. So spare us the stuff about RMS' integrity or lack thereof. It's a non-issue when one chooses a licence whose properties are certainly well understood by now.
As for that hurt coming to Linux you're so pleased about, do you think that if Microsoft somehow succeeds in driving a stake through Linux' heart that it will cause a migration to BSD code? I doubt it. Once Microsoft scavenges all of the BSD code they have a use for, that development model will be targeted next. That's right. Once target numero uno is taken out (if they can that is), they will come for BSD. Better watch out for the frag damage. Sheesh! RMS is justifiably a target of derision. You don't have to be as well.
Oh yeah, the main point of all this. He who writes the code chooses the license. Licences are merely tools. Can we expect polemics against chainsaws just becuase some psychotics like the mess they can make?
Guess it was Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer trying to get stupid Linux freaks to buy M$ hardware.
He saw some dirty arabs and fired. Too bad it was just some friendly kurds, BBC reporters and his fellow cowboys.
Perfect, I can see the headlines now:
1. Open Source community ports Linux to Xbox
2. Gartner reports that actually over 10% of Xboxen sold are used by individuals and companies who install and run linux on them.
3. Microsoft cries foul play, DMCA is brought down upon the porting team.
4. The "Anonymous Donor" of the prize money is rumoured to be some terrorist organization......
5. Microsoft then touts the importance of "Paladium" to root out all evil in the world.....
We are doomed.....
Real men don't need signitures!!!
It's a trap....Don't do it.
Why does anyone care?
Let alone care enough to spend $200,000 on it?
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
A way for Mandrake to make money without groveling!
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread . hp?s=&threadid=15881&perpage=15&highlight=wireless &pagenumber=3
If they lose $200 and they sell it for $199 dollars, it costs them 199 +200 = $499 to build it.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
The cost of being sued by MS - priceless!
Once somebody succeeds in producing Linux on the XBox, what would you be able to do with it? You need peripherals, unless you intend to use it as a server. And even then, you can get much faster systems from companies. Check out http://www.pricewatch.com/ . A barebones Athlon XP 2000+ costs $200 including shipping. Then you buy some memory, some HD, a NIC, and some peripherals. That's a real computer. 733MHz and 64MB RAM and 8GB HD is a joke. Next you're going to tell me that you have a resolution greater than 512x384...
Come on people. How much is your time worth? Next thing you know, distributed net will be attempting to break the public/private key pairs they use in the XBox...
Ok. Let me make a guesstimate of how long it will take you to port Linux to the XBox... First, it took Microsoft a well supported team about 2 years to strip down the Windows NT Kernel and develop a specialized DirectX, specialized HW, and a number of alterations to make this device cheap. Second, you have to reverse engineer all the stuff they did. Third, you have to figure out how to do this legally.
By the time you figure out all you need to do, Microsoft will release an XBox 2. The price of PCs will be half of what it is today, and you will have wasted a lot of time. You should do what I do. I just played Halo with my Fiance for an hour. Now, we're going swimming. Enjoy your youth while you have it. Video consoles are meant to be played.
purchases by Linux users have risen sharply in the past few days. Adding weight to our claim that this whole Linux thing was just a passing fad... ;)
Just my twisted vision of one possible future. GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
For those of you commenting on this, what he means to say is that, given that someone has put up $200,000, the most likely person to do so would be Larry Ellison, but if he were to do so, he wouldn't do it anonymously, which means we wouldn't have to guess.
Think about this for a minute, MS sells xboxen for around $200 where it would cost you $400 to make it using intel hardware. This means you only need a cluster of a little over 1000 to recoup your losses.
... here we come!
And in case anybody doesn't think a beauwolf cluster of xboxen has any value beyond the geek factor, consider this: an xbox may not have an impressive CPU, but it does have an impressive graphics card. Now, what do graphics cards do? That's right, they do polygon operations, And what do polygon operations look like? Like matrix multiplications that's what. Please tell me I don't need to spell out what matricies are for (Hint: think `everything')
I.e. for a tiny amount of money you can build a cluster able to do amazing amounts of matrix manipulation. GPG cracking, neural net simulation, raytracing,
I own a collection of ancient computers made by AT&T, and a few years ago I drafted a bequest to fund the porting of a free version of Unix to them.
Nice to see someone doing this for the Xbox, but it's a shame that NetBSD isn't an option.
It's in the rules:
To be honored, work must be submitted to the "xbox-linux" project at Sourceforge.
Nuff said.
These things usually don't come from mass projects, rather just some guy, releasing working code in the middle of the night, so the 'hoard' effect of a cash prize won't hurt.
;-)
Just look at the X-Box emulator
Seriously, though, a cash prize will just serve to encourage things like the emulator fiasco.
-twb
I know this sounds a bit stupid, considering it was awful generous of the donor to give that large a sum of money to this project. However, who is -really- going to care about Linux running on an Xbox? A few people may, but in my opinion, that's not enough to give $200,000 for. Why didn't this person/group of people donate the money to the actual Linux development project? Why don't they use the money to make the operating system better, instead of trying to get it to run on a game console?
I for one, don't care at all for this project. Attempting to run operating systems on game consoles sounds like a hobby, not a career. It is something geeks do with their free time, and they shouldn't be given $200,000 for it.
Just my rant.
void women (int money, time_t time);
No, no, the XBOX looks nothing like that, it's more like:
P-III 750 - $60
N-force mobo - $70
GForce3 Ti 500 - $250
64mb SDRAM - $10
8GB HDD - $75
the prices are made up, but thats pretty much the xbox, also one should concider the possibility that the gforce could also be used to crunch some numbers, sort of like a really fast MMX.
-Jon
this is my sig.
there are so many more deserving and USEFUL projects out there. Why $200k for this? This is stupid. This is beyond stupid. I seriously hope it's a hoax.
I've got it! We'll offer to pay some linux zealots peanuts to crack those Xboxen we bought bought on ebay. Then we'll cluster them to harness their combined power. Then we can calculate missile trajectories and build targeting systems for the nukes we made from surplus russian smoke alarms, using the plans we downloaded on kazaa!! Just a little embracing and extending of consumer electronics.
Xbox doesn't need more advertisement.
Recently, Richard snuck an exemption into version 3.0a of the GPL which allows Roger to continue using GPL'ed code as if it were a BSD license. The caused quite a stirr amongst the insiders in the Free Software GNUvement and Richard nearly lost not only the FSF position but maintainership of EMACS.
And, most recently, Roger has again slapped Richard in the face with his friendship with Eric Raymond, which blossomed as the pair worked on CLM2 in preparation for final submission to Linus.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Can we stop with the fucking page wideners? I'm trying to browse at -1 to enjoy all the wonderful trolling, but I have to put up with this crap because somebody thinks it's cool.
Its just a matter of reverse engineering the ROM & reformating the hardrives (who's got a PC caddie setup?)
I'd have as a guess that standard Linux (X86) NForce chipset drivers for Nvidia's EV6 (Athlon) NForce chipset would work fine for the XBox's GTL+ (P6) NForce chipset. Just like VIA's 4in1 drivers & VIA's embadded graphics drivers work with all VIA SS7 (P5, 686, K6), GTL+ (P6,C3), EV6 (K7, ie Duron, Athlon) & Netburst (P7 aka the 'P4') boards.
Plus, I gather, the XBox joystick ports are just USB with a different plug.
$450 is a little high for a box with only 64 MB RAM, don't you think? It wouldn't even run windoze.
I say this because when Xbox Live! launches and you stick that little plug into your ethernet port on the back of your xbox to get some good ol frag fests or online RPG's with friends. Well Microsoft has the full specs of their own box with all the ins and outs so they just download a small patch as you login into their service, execute it on your hard drive and BAM your whole system is either toast or it "repairs the linux infection" so you can play xbox online. Every mod chip can be defeated by a quick patch, Microsoft will always have the upper hand when it comes to their online games, which the box was built especially for.
Now then why would ID or some big house gaming company want this? If this geek did release it and get his $200,000 microsoft would do their patch-o-magic and make the game incompatible to prevent other games from using the free linux-friendly enviornment to make their games and just wave their index finger at the game developers.
I really dont think its some big conspiracy, I think its a rich geek who wants to see one of MS's biggest products get hit by Linux in the soft spot.
Anonymous = Bill
Add BLEEM Emulator, we have:
((Xbox Linux) Windows) PS2
Add Linux for PS2, we have:
(((Xbox Linux) Windows) PS2) Linux
I can see the donar being one of two people:
A very anti-Microsoft person.
This person figures that if you can make the X-Box run Linux, then you can get people to buy X-Boxes at the rediculous price that MS have set for them. This will hurt Microsoft in the short term.
A very pro-Miscrosoft person.
This person figures that if you can make the X-Box run Linux, then you can get people to buy X-Boxes at the rediculous price that MS have set for them. This will help Microsoft in the long term.
The problem as I see it is that I can't decide who is right.
What if the cluster is used to composite images.
I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean something like a 3x3 arrangement of 27" TV's set up to make one big picture?
If you're proposing using 1 XBox per TV for such a display using 3D rendering I think you'd need to have the master 3D model on one box, thereby using only one XBox CPU for real-time modelling (of course all GPU's would be jammin'); I can't imagine offhand how to implement a distributed 3D model and distributed display, or even if that's possible that the inter-XBox communication would be fast enough. Without the need for a mod chip and with using real-time high-performance 3D rendering I might imagine this working out cheaper than PC's with high-end 3D cards. (Not counting if you grab used PII's with AGP motherboards.)
However, if you're just using such an array for a 2D display I would imagine--since I'm too lazy to investigate--there exists a VGA-to-NTSC adapter that would drive a TV array from a video card, and I would suspect that it would be cheaper than 1 XBox per TV. (9 Xbox * $200 = $1800. Throw in hub and network & power cabling.) Add PC's, dual-head card or 2nd video cards as needed to scale up.
I'm not sure what else you might mean by "composite images." I was imagining a collage or blend of some sort, but that can be done before feeding it to a display adapter [array].
Nevertheless, to do it with XBoxes would be a geeky cool achievement if not necessarily "the best way".
I'm curious about your project. Do you have a link or description?
truth be told, i've got a lot of spare cash sitting around from all the bad poetry i churn out, year after year. so i figured, what the hell, beats going to some goddamned 12-step program every wednesday. also surfing lame ftp sites.
The anonymous donor is Microsoft. The $200k isn't a reward per se, but the price they're offering to the first devleoper of the kernel for exclusive licensing rights. This is actually an attempt at an end-run around the Linux community, where they'll sue anybody else out of existance for "obviously reverse-engineering" Microsoft's kernel. They expect to make the money back and then some in these lawsuits.
Will they actually release the code? Only in some impossibly handicapped form that won't let you do much more than play Minesweeper. And five pages of fine print.
---microsoft would come up with the hardware version of their software EULA. You could never "own" a new Xbox, merely get the "use" of it using only their branded games, etc., as long as you "signed the agreement" by opening the package. They could also make you swear to never transfer possession of it perhaps. There's even more if ya thunked on it some. Sort of like a car lease in a way, use it, no mods, no nuthin.
.00000001ALPHA RELEASED ON STALEBREAD DOT COM!- get on the serious coding stick for a month, or perhAPs, a serious consortium, say 10 guys work like the debble for one month, splitsies is 20 g's apiece that way.
-anyway, OBVIOUSLY, the anonymous rich fart with the 200 mega large is a game company, they are tired of waiting for all the gnu coders to get on the stick and stop developing "themes and skins" for other bogus stuff, they want to sell GAMES that run on most anything, including the xboxen.
Ya CAN'T tell me this sort of prize wouldn't make some guy sweating the rent and fooling around at night with something else - MONKEYPUS VERSION
...but the exchange rate isn't that bad/good. You'd only be a multi-thousandaire.
Who could benefit from this?... Sony!
How about porting lunix (c64) to trs?
I am the same guy and "Anonymous Coward" is my nick. Sure, I can post thousands of times a day on slashdot but my fingers sure get tired. The brain survives the day in good condition since most of my posts don't require much actual though.
If you could develop an interface to the GPU and video memory, you could use the graphics chip in some rendering farms or for other, more generic vector calculations. Who says you have to use a video chip for playing games or even displaying graphics?
I'm going to wander quite outside my area of actual knowledge here, but what the heck, this is Slashdot.
GPU's are designed to render, rotate, etc. polygon models with bitmap skins, "tactile" textures, light, shadow and fog in real time. I'm not sure offhand if you can actually get the results of their mathematical calculations directly. I've seen screen captures and videos of 3D-rendered scenes (games), so you can at least capture the 2-D viewable result.
To render, say, a Pixar movie with the GPU probably wouldn't be feasible (in my uniformed assessment). Since the GPU's are designed for real time, I doubt they can render to production quality given any longer length of time. I was about to go on about the resolution not being enough for production, but if it's a cluster of XBox GPU's, then perhaps it could use one centralized 3D model and have each GPU render part of the scene, to be later stiched together. That would be cool if it could work, but I still doubt that the rendering quality would be sufficient and I wonder if a 3D scene rendered over an array of XBoxes would place light sources and reflective surfaces too far out of some of the GPUs' scopes to render properly.
As far as non-rendering work by the GPU, I seriously doubt 3D GPU's can be coerced to do general-purpose calculations like a CPU or FPU does.
Probably not worth it in the end, but it would be "fun".
I heartily agree there!
After my post, I'm a little more optimistic that this could be done in a much-less-than-Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks-quality way, and in a way that a group of XBoxer's could have a party and leave their cluster creating and stitching a homemade 3D video overnight.
....this anonymous donor is actually Bill Gates trying new and desperate ways of getting people to buy an Xbox.
Saddam Hussein
http://www.xboxhacker.net/
The BIOS hacking forums there is a focus of efforts to reverse-engineer the X-Box for the purpose of allowing Linux to run on it.
In the last few weeks we have successfully recovered the RC4 key used to encrypt the second bootloader in the BIOS, this has led to discoveries about the PIC chip that have allowed a minimal clean BIOS to run for the first time.
I also run a site at http://warmcat.com/milksop which has a variety of GPL hardware designs that are of use in getting the X-Box to run Linux (although they have many other applications).
On the prize, I worry it will change the ethos of people working towards this goal, which until now has shown the best side of people with a common, righteous purpose working together.
That's the source of my problem...
199 + 200 =399...
but when you've got the old price of the X-Box and the new price of the X-Box...The price of tea in China, Timbuktu and who knows what else, you kind of forget which two numbers you're adding and pick the two nearest numbers passing through your head to add instead.
Not to flame you here.. I think your post is well-reasoned.
Thank you.
Instead, I suspect the goal here is to simply punch holes in the financial hull of the goodship XBOX.
A noble goal! Seriously, I can buy that explanation, too.
You didn't say who you think is punching that hole. Sony? (Same industry) Apple? (General hatred; but they might have asked for Darwin-on-XBox) A Linux vendor? (Not sure how this would help IBM or Red Hat; can't think of who else has that much cash) Or maybe a PVR, satellite, or home automation vendor that thinks XBox & UltimateTV are the beginnings of a major Microsoft invasion into their turf? (Something I've believed since XBox came out. I think Microsoft wants to take over the entire house and has a plan--proably envisioning a Passport login for your toaster oven. "How do you want your toast today?")
AH! I know who! X-10.com! They have the money (they must; they can buy every pop-up, pop-under and side story ad on the internet), and they don't want Microsoft cameras that will plug into the XBox USB ports or via ethernet-wireless gateway. That's the ticket.
Seriously again, if it's the "disrupt Microsoft" strategy then is it a direct competitor of the XBox trying to kick them out of the market or another company that feels threatened in a different market and wants to punch Microsoft in a soft spot?
Two different brain processes decide they want to solve the problem. One decides to round 199 up to 200, add the two numbers, then subtract 1. the other recognizes that the 100's position is the only position that need any work done... They get in a fight and hillarity ensues.
I've used IR on other laptops and desktops, no worries. If by `dual head' you mean flatscreen and external monitor at once, yes, it worked the once I tried it. I've used wireless on a variety of laptops and seen no problems.
My USB works better than under Windows. I plug my Sony DSC-F707 in, Linux sees it, sucks out the pictures, and scrubs the camera all automagically. No DLL and system conflicts, no bluescreens, not even any keys to hit, never dropped the ball.
Considering how hard Dell and co strive to make things non-standard and incompatible, this is pretty amazing. Especially so since nobody in the Linux community is holding a legal or financial gun to Dell's head and saying `it better work' like Microsoft do one way or another.
Yes: clueless wonder.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
But I say `wait and see.' (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
microsoft-germany will put you in a gas chamber if you get caught. do you really want to risk getting caught in germany?
They'll probably put you in a concentration camp and force you to code in directX for the rest of your life
Anonomous donor. Probly just some teenage kid that wants Linux on his X-box. I am thinking that when someone actually does it, they won't be able to find him because he was anononmous.
Then again maybe the AC is Woz, or Paul Allen.
Linux on iPAQ group...
Linux on Dreamcast group...
Linux on Netpliance I-Opener group...
Linux on GE Toasters group...
Linux on your Swedish Penis Enlarger Pump group...
Now now many hackers will be holding on to their little projects until some boron comes along to offer them big money to release it?
Namely XBill! :)
No, it was Osama Bin Laden
As an American citizen, would I be breaking any laws if I offered $50.00 to the first person to make the remote control from the Xbox DVD Movie Playback Kit fully compatible with a tv tuner card?
If not, how do I change citizenship? (just kidding)
Seriously though, I'd offer another $50.00 for a Tivo clone that could run on this thing.
funny how you got a -1 for telling the truth ;/
The've got billions. And they like Linux. Hell this is even better than the el-cheapo PC's they are selling with Linux. It has already been proven that the game ports are USB, so make a few donlges for keyboard and mouse. YOU know the rubes won't want to buy a monitor if they don't have to .. 200$ PC, no monitor required :)
Put Lindows and / or WineX on it and bam. You've got the greatest gaming machine made. Its a PC and a console. Two mutually exclusive ideas.
Because he doesn't wanna get caught. I mean, what can you do if you were a multi-millionair, trapped in a cave, where there are a huge world wide manhunt for you? That's right, play video games all day and figure out some fun things to do with the consoles.
No doubt it was Osama Bin Laden.
What better way to turn Americans against each other than by dangling money in front of their noses?
Sounds like a Bushism to me...
If you're cheap enough to use an XBox, you'd use chopped-down COTS before you bought Sun.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Not sure what RedHat or Ibm would get out of this?
Its a brilliant strategy, actually, and I could see them both going for it.
alex
I'll never own an XBox. That much is certain. But I wish the people that try for the XPort of Linux all the luck in the world. Hopefully, once it's done, Microsoft will get some mud in their eye. But then again, they'll probably just sue till they get their way again. Crybabies...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Think it through people. Independent game devs are reported to be paying $10 per shipped game in royalties for games developed with the the official XDK. There is plenty of settled case law saying you CAN release a title without paying up and that you can break any obstacles the console vendor throws up, including adding the trademarked Nintindo logo if it is required to get the machine to execute your code. Since it IS settled case law I can think of a few game shops who might be tempted to add that $10 to their bottom line instead of Microsoft. A $200K inventment goes into the black when unit #20,000 of the first title goes out the door, which will be in the initial production run.
Wanna bet BioWare had a secret reason for doing a Linux port of Neverwinter Nights? Or if not them there are a dozen or so equally good suspects. It probably isn't a huge shop that does a lot of console biz though. Screwing M$ out of their royalties would scare Sony & Nintendo that they might be next so there is enough risk that I'd doubt it is somebody on the scale of EA and such.
The big shops need the good relationship with the hardware vendors as new hardware comes down the pipe.
Democrat delenda est
that NetBSD runs on XBox first.
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
He just wants to use Xbox as a cheap missile guiding systems running linux.
Don't you remember that story about Playstation2 ?
The NIV says:
(emphasis mine)The King James says:
Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Who wins from this? Here is my educated guess...
Some people have suggested "Microsoft"; others have suggested "Larry Ellison"; still others have suggested various X-Box competitors, based on the idea that the hardware retails for $200 but has a COGS of $350 (are you ready to spend 1.3 times $X just to cost Microsoft $X?).
Microsoft is right out; discrediting their digital rights management scheme in place in the X-Box would be bad news for them; success in phase "B" of the project does just that.
Larry is a good guess... the deadline date is obviously there so that this can be claimed against a tax bill. But as has been pointed out, Larry is unlikely to be anonymous on purpose.
The X-Box competitor angle is also a red herring, do to the economics of trying to outspend Microsoft, at a sub-1 (.75) value multiplier for each dollar spent.
A good option might be someone competing with Microsoft for the Digital Rights Management pie. This is actually not that likely: eventually, if it works out to have value for this purpose, the hand signing the checks will become public knowledge. A failure of Microsoft in this arena will also tar anyone else trying to enter that market with the same brush of impossibility. So that dog won't hunt.
So what's left?
My odds-on favorite for this is... drumroll, please... hidden in the rule:
"To be honored, work must be submitted to the
"xbox-linux" project at Sourceforge. It is not
enough to publish information/code somewhere
else. We want people to work together, so
there has to be a central point where all work
concentrates."
That's right... Sourceforge. They get to prove that their site "works" for creating and maintaining a successful, highly visible Open Source project. They get a lot of geeks trained up on using it, and they get press release rights, among "other valuable considerations".
Remember: you heard it here first.
-- Terry
I'm the one offering the reward.
Is it just me or does this sound suspicious?
Perhaps this anonymous doner is someone planted my Microsoft.
Then when the people come forward to claim their price Microsoft slaps them with a suit.
Either that or offers them a job.
Leaving aside my disagreement with your view of the GPL, which I think sometimes is just purposefully wrong-headed, your post still doesn't make much sense.
Microsoft's motives in this matter will be entirely about how much this project can hurt their own bottom line. They may *act* as though software can't ever get written without a financial incentive, but we all know better. If a volunteer, unpaid effort started to get close, you *know* they would be just as hostile to it.
And although they can certainly adopt technical counter-measures, legal ones are unlikely to be effective. Prize or no prize, once the code is out there, they can't make it go away.
Your second paragraph is just a non-sequitur. Assuming there is some "cause of Linux" that can be hurt (which I don't myself perceive, any more than I see a "crusade of screwdrivers" or a "jihad of pencils"), it can't be hurt by providing it with resources, a big fat unpopular target and the chance of notoriety.
(The advocates of Linux that *you* seem to be thinking about will still count it a victory even if all you can get on the Xbox is a bash prompt and the developers end up in jail.)
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
...so they must know how wrote it, in order to transfer the money.
When they know who wrote it they'll also know who to sue!
Watch out boy'n'girls: life is hard...
-c
Yep. I was thinking the same thing. Sourceforge has been making alot of changes as of late and they appear to be aggressivly going after something a bit differently. I just haven't been able to put my finger on it exactly.
I also thought there were a couple points in the contest rules that looked like potential motivation for the anonymous donor. First is the way the prize money is to be split up in part 1. Obviously the more difficult sections will get more money than the easier ones (some of which are already close to completion.) This means money will be paid out, for sure. Second is the fact that half of the total prize will go to part 2, which seems like a fairly difficult feat considering the legalities and timeframe.
This makes me think that the donor probably isn't out to take a jab at BG or Microsoft, just doesn't have that kind of money. Instead, has several different needs from the community.
This leads me to a conclusion... and YOU can say you heard it herefirst!
The donor is simply a 'mod manufacturer', looking to make a quick and sweet profit on components necessary to hack the box. It might be cableing, USB adapters, BIOS sockets... I don't know. Being the first one to market on 'THE kit' that nets you a quick $10 (or more) profit can be extreemly profitable, not to mention the bragging rights and loyalty the community will show when the prizes are paid.
Seems like a good deal to someone positioned with products for the hacker community.
Erik
My Public Key can be found in a fake rock by my front door.
It will all be in non transferrable Win XP licences anyway...(want office for them, you gotto pay)
FRA: STFU GTFO
does the xbox come with an EULA the prohibits messing with the internal software? it would be interesting to see microsofts reaction (the real one, not some tv, or newspaper description) if this project were complete.
I write code.
It's hardly a complicated project!
Imagine for once that the Xbox in uncrackable, then such a contest would motivate many sales by Microsofts biggest foes - Linux geeks.
So later nobody cracks it, and all these geeks are left over with gaming platforms, so what do they do? They buy Xbox Games!
It's no infringement if M$ contracts you to do it! :)
So i hope they did it. They whould loose money and get a HA HA!
(IANAL!!)
FRA: STFU GTFO
Sure, it would be fun to do, but I could just as easily toss a Mini-ITX motherboard, which has a tvout, into a pizzabox with a 100w atx power supply, hd, and dvd and come out just over the price of an x-box. No hacking required. Plus, you have a PCI slot for something like maybe a REAL audio card. Then you have decent sound quality, plus AC3 passthrough if you want it :)
MS currently sells the Xbox at a loss and makes up the loss on games. If it bacame possible to run games that don't benefit MS on the Xbox. They could no longer sell it at a loss. If they get out of the business it's a duh-win for S/N. If they increase the price, so that then no longer lose money on sold units. S/N can increase prises and make more direct money(or lose less, if that's your pick of formulation) or they can sell more units and make more money of game licence fees. So it makes sense.
FRA: STFU GTFO
and i raise it to 650 g's.
that's about something less than 3 quarters of a million.
and i have an extra request. i would like to be able to install Debian GNU/Linux, so Stallman will then force them to call it GNU/Xbox.
I love you silly linux people.
That you will do anything to go against MS is opening up the door to the X-Box so those inclined will now be able to fully pirate the legal games.
Thanks Pandora.
10 print "booting leuk_he/linux ont trs80 Model A"
20 print "No HD detected"
30 print "No FD detected"
40 print "entering runlevel 0"
50 print "starting lsh"
60 print #
70 read b
80 goto 60
I donate this program to open source.
In decending order of likelyhood:
a) Hoax.
b) Crazed flaming libertarian (John Gilmore?), who sees XBox as a dry run for Palladium and wants to establish a precident and/or scare vendors off from trusting it.
c) Crazed MS-hater who wants XBoxen sold below cost. (Ellison?)
d) Insane conspiracy theory. (M$. Sony. NSA).
Any other possibilities?
Think about it! Look at what was done to make the movie Titanic! They used clusters of old Sun IPC's to render the scenes for the movie. They used the old Sun machines not for their power, but for their size. They had a physical space limitation they had to work with. In addition, they found that it took MUCH less time to have MANY little (very weak) Sun machines render the scenes rather then spending a ton of money on a cutting edge cluster! Those old Sun machines alone a PATHETIC by today's standards.
... maybe he could save some money on the special effects and pay for a decent script for the movie this time).
... and it may even get you a nice bonus, raise, or promotion (or all three) if you could cut the cost of cluster in half!! This is a no-brainer! Once somebody ports Linux to these machines (for $200,000), everyone else in the world is going to have cheap (Linu)Xboxes! Even if it is just for your home Linux PC or if you wanted a REALLY nice firewall or router (provided it could get the other network interface needed), this thing would be GREAT!
:)
Now just think of how much more time they could have saved using an (Linu)Xbox cluster! The space constraints would have been met AND they would have saved a TON of time rendering all of those scenes.
Maybe it is George Lucas putting up the money so he can do this with the third Star Wars movie (he still needs to make improvments from the last two movies
In any case, like posted above, if you needed a LARGE cluster of PCs, and if you could get a cluster of decent PCs with each node costing only $200 (instead of paying $400 - $500 per node), wouldn't you do it? I'm sure that it would make the accountants happy
How is Microsoft going to check every home in America to see if they have an Xbox running Linux? It won't have their OS anymore, so its not like they can spy on you like they do with their other products
Of course, I still like the Bill Gates theory. It would make for a better story than the logical reason I posted above.
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Ooooh, that's a good one. Yeah, you right. Didn't such a break happen for one of the older Nitindo consoles?
Out of morbid curiosity, what do you have to know before you can sit down and reverse engineer something like the XBox. With respect to education is the stuff on the graduate level? post graduate? Specificly what areas of study are useful for an endevor like this? I'm wondering because i'm a first year computer engineering major and a lot of this still seems like magic.
Since there is a huge debate to if this can actually be done or not I too would like to list a few "anonymous" rewards**.
.exe file
-I'll pay the sum of $2.88 for a screenshot of microsoft.com using a mozilla browser.
-I will shell out $34.65 for actual documented proof that Linus Tovalds gets women.
-I will contribute in the upwards of $5.86 to view a quicktime movie on Red Hat 7.3
-I will pay anyone $12.45 for a picture of a linux or unix shell launching an
-And finially I will pay in the upwards of $2.43 to hear a distro power up with a default windows logon sound.
**Rewards may not be given
...to my very first non-anonymous /. post: a conspiracy theory with BillG held captive by a Ballmer-Myhrvold-led cabal.
And now I'm stuck with a nick which nobody can understand except in about every 100 posts (like this one!).
Thanks, I needed that.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Why do this? What will it accomplish? I am not being sarcastic. I am truly curious. What is the goal here? Is there money to be made from this? Do we think that Microsoft will adopt this if it is accomplished?
Joshua 24:15
Step 1: Call K-Mart. Order Linux PC
Step 1: Place Linux PC on top of Xbox
Step 2: Turn it on
--- What?
I will give anyone the sum of $5.67 if anyone can successfully emulate MS Clippy within Star Office.
Homer: "Explain how." Homer's brain: "Money can be exchanged for goods and services!" Homer: "Woo hoo!"
$8.95/mo web hosting
Could it be Saddam Hussein?
Naaah!
Coderz 4 Life
In other words, they'll still lose $125 per box, but they'll make it up on volume.
(And yes, I know it's an old joke.)
Running Sony PS2 games on the XBox. If I'm not mistaken, PS2 has a game SDK running on Linux. Would a Linux port on the XBox allow it to run some PS2 games?
Close...it IS the product of socialist thinking though. Not that that's always a bad thing.
...remember him? He was the one who killed Lord Bill in the end, and restored balance to the 'Info'.
If he can get LINUX to run on the XBOX, then he can import "Game Boxes" instead of Computers. (Computers are on a restricted list)
So, what can $200,000 get you?? Company subsidised PC's (Ahem.. Game boxes)
Wolf
Where ever you go, There you are
If a $200K payment can truely be made anonymously, with speculation being that large companies are the source of the prize, one has to wonder what other payoffs are taking place without outside scrutiny. Campaign finance limits and other regulations designed to limit corruption are a complete joke if these types of transfers can slip below the radar. If it does turn out that a corporation is behind the bounty, it would not surprise me to find out that other "prizes" have slipped into the pockets of our politicians. - Just a thought.
Obviously, everyone should buy an xbox, because it'll make m$ go broke the more they sell without people buying games! ;)
And it looks so professional. When your boss comes and asks "where is the firewall of the company", just answer: "oh it's that Xbox in the corner."
That's an interesting notion. But if someone was so fired up to ship unlicensed games, why were all the Dreamcast game releases licensed?
Now I do seem to recall that the commercial Pelican MP3 player was on a CD-R, but still, where were the unlicensed games? It was well known since about April 2000 how to boot on an unmodified Dreamcast.
And for that matter, you can boot on an unmodified PS1 at this point, I believe. Or someone could have included a $2 mod cartridge with their unlicensed title. Hmm.
Broadband connection: $59.95/month
Slashdot account: Free
Seeing 8 different people all making the same cookie-cutter "Priceless" jokes: (-1, Redundant)
Seriously, the priceless thing has been more run into the ground than "All your base". Hell, they even did a priceless parody on that shortlived, humor-free golf show on Comedy Central with the Murray Brothers. It's just not funny anymore, if it ever was in the first place.