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Microsoft Talks Handhelds, Xbox Linux
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Canada.com interview with Xbox head honcho Robbie Bach, which shoots him some wide-ranging and perceptive questions about Microsoft's console strategy. Interesting answers include whether Microsoft wants to get into the handheld console market ("It's like starting a new business...we will focus on making the current Xbox successful."), and their views of Linux for Xbox ("..the numbers are not really that big. It's not a commercial as much as it is an intellectual property issue and we always pursue those.")
when people are buying a $180 system to run games on and instead mod it and install whatever. your loosing money on all of them, so you're loosing.
Could this be another wave attempt at handheld consoles? Sony is in the process of making a handheld to go along with their top selling gaming console. Meanwhile, Nintendo, who still owns the handheld gaming console market, is standing strong with the GameBoy series (GameCube isn't holding up as well compared to it's little brother). Let's see how the two (MS and Sony) do against Nintendo in this category. If history holds up, Nintendo better start cranking with ideas.
Efren Belizario
headspeak.com
Simply put, if you're running Linux on a machine that MS sells with their own OS, you're cheating them out of market share. The Hardware may be sold, but having their own system booted on a machine provides the mindshare that's more important long term.
Microsoft have budgeted that a certain amount of XBoxes will be sold. Removing them from their intended purpose in the eyes of MS puts that planning out. Although like they said, the numbers are not that big.
MS having that level of control over hardware they've already sold however, is something I don't agree for.
Working in Japan for one of XBOX's main competitors, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that XBOX's lackluster sales seem to be similar to those of American cars... big, bulky, typical of the American mindset that bigger is better. No one buys them (American cars nor XBOXen) in Japan because size is at a premium.
Whereas, with Nintendo, we have designed the GameCube from the ground up to reflect Japanese aesthetic sentiments of small size, symmetry, and fitting into the big picture without standing out, a fundamental tenet of Zen Buddhist philosophy -- not to mention the practical advantages when considering the size of the typical Japanese home.
Furthermore, we at Nintendo have always been sceptical of the "Everything and the kitchen sink" approach that Microsoft and Sony have taken with their consoles. We do but one thing -- gaming -- but do it well, unlike our other competitors who want to be a DVD player/CD player/PC/Internet terminal/TiVo. Our philosophy is to focus on one thing -- gaming, and make it our core competency, continuing to come out with seminal hits that people synonimize with the video game industry, Mario, Zelda, and so on.
We are continuing this trend with our future game consoles, and I would advise Microsoft to please to more serious market search if they wish to be a serious contender in the Japanese marketplace.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
Apparently the highly anticipated XBOX-2 will not carry an nVidia graphics chipset. I must inject my opinion that, the way the GeForce 5 cards exist in their bulky and unoptimised state (can you say leafblower?) make me glad that Microsoft may be going with ATI or having a custom chip made for it. I know I could definitely do without heatsink-enabled RAM.
With the emergence of smaller form factor PCs like the oqo it really does not seem SO far fetched that MS might introduce a handheld gaming system.
;)!
However, it seems that absolutly everyone is entering the market including Nokia and sony.
Does MS really want to fight it out with sony on the handheld platform, when they have been utterly beaten on the console one?
Regardless, since it would probably be based on x86 hardware, it might make an excelent portable linux system
Here's Microsoft's patent application that covers disallowing participation in online services.
Q. Do you ever get impatient with Bungie, the developers of Halo 2, the sequel to your flagship title Halo?
A. Software development is part science and part art. I have a lot of faith in those guys to execute and produce on time, just like they did for Halo for the Xbox launch.
Because Bungie can always be relied on for release dates. I'm still waiting for my Q1 2001 Halo PC release.
How quickly we forget.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Wow, that's beautiful.
As a citizen of the United States of America, we can expect to have certain rights. As employees/customers of an American corporation, we can expect diddley. And according to Microsoft, that's just the way it should be. The guy at least deserves credit for being forthright about where things stand.
It's not just Microsoft, though. We live in a democracy. We have a free market. Nonetheless, corporations whose modus operandi resembles that of a feudal fiefdom by and large dominate our working lives. And when we leave work, we owe them our allegiance as 'customers'.
But who cares? We all have bread on the table. A glass of wine. A Tivo. A comfortable chair.
Society today is as hierarchical, class-based, and inequitable as ever. Perhaps more so. The only reason people aren't storming the castles with pitchforks is that they're too busy watching TV. That's the scary part. Seems to me that things are just getting worse and worse, but nobody cares. Why should they?
The reason why, of course, is that they deserve better. And if wealth was distributed more equitably, they would have better. But people are just too damn content to agitate for change.
So Bill Gates will continue to bitch-slap mod-chippers, all the while crying about his constitutional 'right' to do what he wants. Asshole.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
I mean, what if I want to buy an Xbox to turn it into a paperweight?
Or an aquarium?
Or hell, maybe I'll hollow the thing out and wear it as a hat.
I bought it, paid through the nose for it, and if I want to ignore all their games and use the case as a home for fish, well, that's my business.
Now, I can understand them blocking modded Xboxes from the online stuff, because people *could* use modifications of some sort to cheat in online games. But that's not an IP problem; when they offer a service like that, they can deny it whenever the want. If they start going after people legally for modchips, though, that's a different story.
Running Linux on XBOX violates Microsoft's IP rights and they should prosecute everyone who attempts it.
I think the idea here is that once you own something, it's yours. You can use it for it's intended purpose (playing games), use it as a book end, if you can find a way to have sex with it, by all means - do so. Take it apart, mod the hell out of it, no problem.
However, there is a grey area here. The mod chips might be an IP voilation. This is what old MS wants to crack down on, not the person who wants to put linux on their machine.
As long as we're feeding the AC trolls, might as well throw in that I really kinda like my X-Box, but I do wish it had more games for kids. Last summer, we were in best buy looking for some stuff and I let the play with the game cube. Took each of them (ages 5-9) about 10 seconds to start playing the game. I've never seen something like that on Xbox. Course... I remember when it was cool to have 2 "Fire" buttons on a joystick.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
"I thought that argument was put to rest when those gameshark cartridges came out for the NES. Maybe I'm thinking about the wrong thing, but I could have sworn lawsuites were filed and gameshark won in the long run. "
If memory serves, Nintendo tried to claim that that Game Genie caused damage to people's games. There was a breath of truth to it, enter the wrong code and you could erase save games. You could also make the game unstable (only when the Genie was hooked up...) thus making the game seem defective. Yes, Nintendo lost. Nintendo's stance on that was pretty shitty. I wish I could tell you what their real concern was, but unless a bunch of people called with tech support issues, I have trouble imagining it. (Was it possible it could have been used to play unauthorized games?)
Here's a question for you: Would the Game Genie case hold up today in light of the DMCA? If you're looking for the difference between then and now, that'd be the first direction I'd point you.
"Derp de derp."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3051331.stm
The last sentence is the article is a whopper:
"The software giant is slowly laying the groundwork for total market dominance in the coming years.
Don't forget that Nintendo went after one of the video rental places (Blockbuster?) for renting out games; their argument was that the rental of video games would eat into the market. Nintendo was smacked down by the law, and thus we can rent video games. In those days, Nintendo was pretty vicious legally.
From the article (emphasis in bold added):
I find it interesting that even someone in the industry, who obviously has an interest in drawing women to the hobby, himself admits he mostly plays with his 12-year-old son. I wonder if he's tried "selling" the women in his own personal life on it? Does his wife play? His mom? His sisters, or women friends?? (Granted, as he's in the industry, it's likely a lot of his friends, including women, are also in the industry, but aside from that...)
I frequently see articles on modern gaming demographics that say more women are playing video games than is generally thought, though the numbers seem to vary. Is this really the case? If so, why are so many of the games obviously targetted toward 12-year-old boys (or older males, who arguably have largely the same interests)?
After doing a bit of reading, I'd have to say that I think you're right, but only to a point... observe
"[0008] The public key architecture involves writing a private key and a digital certificate into each game console during manufacturing. The certificate contains the public key corresponding to the private key. The certificate is part of a certificate chain that includes a certification authority certificate associated with a certification authority at each manufacturing site and a root certificate from which the certification authority certificate is derived. Whenever a game console goes online for registration, a certificate chain verification process along with proof of knowledge of the private key stored on the game console are used to authenticate the console as genuine."
Many games do this for piracy prevention already, granted. But from everything I'm reading in the patent sofar, it sounds as if Microsoft is patenting a system similar to a CD key schema that would allow for microsoft's online service to check for mod chips or memory hacks. Now, to me, this seems like a good way for the console to be constructed with failsafes against cheating in online games, which is a direction the console gaming market is going.
This IS a useful thing. How many online gaming communities are plagued with cheating? There are numerous games my friends and I stopped playing online because of the aimbots and other cheats that were clogging the servers.
What it looks like Microsoft is proposing is patenting a schema to have the console checked for modifications so that they can prevent "cheaters" (as the Microsoft employee put it during the interview) from going online and ruining every honest player's gaming fun.
Knock it if you will. Call it stiffling innovation if you will. All it appears to me is that Microsoft found a way to build encryption and authentication into their consoles for the purposes of denying people who are potentially hacking their hardware or memory to cheat the system from doing so on thier X-box live or next-gen live system.
----- I want my LART.
There's Mechassault for the PC? Or is it in development? I hadn't heard anything about this.
I wonder if he's just blowing smoke on the "synergy between PC and console gaming divisions" answer.
Ravi
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
If my memory serves me correctly, wouldn't tying the software and hardware together create an antitrust issue? Game consoles have always been treated differently than computers, but Microsoft seems to make it fuzzy as to whether xbox is a computer or a console. If its a console, Microsoft would, at least in theory, be able to tie hardware and software together, wrapped neatly in some DMCA TPM. However, if xbox is a computer, then you should be able to load any damn OS that pleases you. Of course, xbox live is a different story. If you subscribe to the network, you have to follow the terms of service.
For those who won't read the article, here is an
... this is a 10, 15 and 20 year investment.
interesting question:
How long will Microsoft support a platform that seems destined to be in the red for the next few years?
So MS is gonna inject cash in this project for many years. Expect a hard fight in the console market for ever.
Many people do not understand the difference between free and politically free. For example, you are not free to kill someone. Developing violent content has nothing to do with political freedoms. Our forefathers were concerned with protecting policital freedoms, not profits.
The reason some mod chips are illegal is that they effectively replace the Xbox BIOS with one of their own. The thing is, the BIOS is some of these chips is actually a hacked version of the Microsoft Xbox BIOS, or at least contains some original XBox BIOS code. That's why Microsoft was able to sue the owner of isonews for selling mod chips, - he was selling Microsoft coprighted code in the modchips, not because mod chips are inherently illegal.
Microsoft would probably have some power against some mod chips under the DMCA, as many of them allow you to copy XBox games to the hardrive and copy them over the network to a PC, where they can then be shared with other people. They also allow people to ftp game images to the Xbox hard drive and play them from there. Since these actions circumvent the XBox disc copy protection, mod chips which allow this are probably on shaky ground.
Ive noticed that some modchips don't come with any BIOS preinstalled at all now, so that you have to download the BIOS from the internet before you can use it, presumably to get around just this kind of legal restriction.