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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.")
I can see the XBox handheld now
:P
One foot by 3 inches thick and about 6 inches deep. Somewhere around the size of a PS2
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
I'd be very curious to know how running Linux on an Xbox is cheating.
"Vinnie! Guido! Go 'pursue' the X-Box Linux intellectual property issue. To a satisfactory conclusion."
Goons: "Daaaah, right away, boss! Heehee heheh!"
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Why would I want a portable blue screen? I get enough of that at home. :)
and we always pursue those.
Yes, far be it from you to let a great injustice, like someone using their Xbox how they see fit, from going unpunished.
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
In one breath, "For example, we can sense and disable an Xbox modified with third party "modchips" and not allow it to play online." In the next, "Telling us what we can or can't create, we think is unconstitutional."
Well, if Microsoft did an Xbox handheld, you'd need a damn strong right hand to hold it. Still, I guess if the market is adolescent makes, requiring a strong right hand isn't a problem.
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
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.
From the article: Telling us what we can or can't create, we think is unconstitutional.
But of course if MS tells YOU what you can or cannot create, that's perfectly OK.
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
This isn't piracy, in any sense. Of course it doesn't involve boarding ships at sea and stealing cargo/kidnapping passengers, which is actual piracy. But it's not copyright infringement, which sometimes gets called piracy, either.
There's no "intellectual property" issue here at all, however much MS wishes they could find one. This is hardware. You buy it, it's yours. Period.
Of course we can all understand that they'd prefer to have people only buying their loss-leaders in order to run the games that they make heaps on. And most people do. But those who don't are perfectly within their rights. If MS really doesn't like it, they can start pricing the boxes more reasonably. It's their choice. But of course they want to have their cake and eat it too, and the sad thing is they have enough money to buy politicians with that they may yet get it.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
First of all you have some pretty fuzzy math there:
>>when I buy a $180 system that cost $100 to make, you just made $100 regardless of what I do with it afterward
180-100=80 not 100.
Anyways, back to my point. I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but all recent reports have shown that MS, Sony, Nintendo are selling their gaming hardware at a loss. This has been the way that the industry has worked over the years: sell the systems cheaply, make it up by collecting the royalty and licensing fees.
Secondly, your naive statement on piracy: You fail to recognize the sunk cost of R&D in creating the X-box. All this has to come from somewhere. The measily amount of money made from selling the hardware will not come close to making up the 100s of millions of dollars spent on developing the system.
Anyways, my point is not that you should not be modding or pirating, but rather, don't delude yourself into thinking that it is not an illegal activity. Or justify it with that you would not have bought the pirated game in the first place.
I mean, I have pirated my share of games, and modded some consoles, but I don't delude myself into thinking what I'm doing is right. Piracy is piracy is piracy.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
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
But it's not about piracy...iot's about playing imports.
Why should I be limited to the shit that comes out in europe? Same for dvd's...can you explain regoin coding as anything else than a mechanism to control the market? And can you find a law that says I am not allowed to bypass someone who wants to limit my acces to commercially sold information that I legally pay for? No, you can't.
You can find a law which makes it illegal for me to bypass protection schemes...but if those schemes are illegal in the first place (ie anti-compettitive and anti-trust), then my rights supercede the ones which prevent me from doing what I have every right to do.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
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.
> Q. How important is the Japanese market to you?
This question bugged me. Imagine you were answering, and had no idea what was happening, what would you say?
A. Not very. We find the japanese insignificant.
A. Very - the very existance of the xbox'es fate, lies in their hands!
A. We want to be successful in Japan because it's a gaming market and an important territory where we have a lot of third party game publishers.
bah
Where they could begin to get at you is if you ran Linux on an XBox, and then connected up to their online gaming system. If the system was designed to reject anything that wasn't running the MS XBox OS, and you spoofed it into thinking that your XBox-Linux was in fact the original OS, then you could be in trouble (because the TOS for the online service would undoubtedly prohibit you from connecting with a less-than-virgin box).
But if all you were doing was just running Linux on your XBox, just for the pure hell of it and because you can, without connecting up to their servers, I think you're probably safe. At least, I don't see how this would possibly infringe on their IP. Seems to me like they're just trying to discourage people...toss around the threat of an IP lawsuit and watch any large-scale effort to distribute an alternate XBox OS disappear.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Q. Folks have even built a Linux-Xbox computer. How can you control this?
A. Electronic hobbyists will do what they want to do...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. If someone finds a way to cheat, we close it down and do an update so people can't anymore.
First off, he is being vague, intentionally no doubt, so no one really knows what he means by "we always pursue those".
Secondly, how is this question dealing with cheaters? I modded my xbox to run Linux on it, not cheap, I have no interest in the xbox live service, its just one more way to connect me to people, and I hate people. Are you comming to get me because I like to tinker?
I don't even play pirate games on my modded xbox, not for lack of options I might add, I could have every game I wanted. But there is still only one game worth playing on my Halo Machi..... I mean xbox.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
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.
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)?
How is he an asshole by saying, "If you are on our Xbox Live! service, we reserve the right to boot you if you have a modchip or other cheat device (such as Action Replay hacked saves) turned on for your Xbox Live! games."
I love that they ban cheaters and people who are just assholes. Why do you think I stopped playing PC games? People'd always accuse me of cheating if I was winning.
Whinning that he has rights but won't let you mod chip Xboxs that are on Live! is like Bill Gates whinning that he can't just come into your house and pee on your floor. It's your private property to use as you please, just like the entire Live! network is MS property to do with as they fucking well please.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
They produced the hardware, with their DRM, running on their service. They can do with it whatever they like, and there's nobody holding a gun to your head to buy into it.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
> Why is it, that people always post big stories about the XboX ?
...
... oh wait, they actually stole that idea. But they've written at least a few pretty decent products over the years, like SQL Server ... oh wait, they bought that.
We enjoy reading various Xbox insiders talk about overtaking PS2 for the very same reason that we enjoying reading posts with extraneous commas and random capitalization: It's comedy gold.
> I don't see nearly as much stories about the PS/2
I almost bit on that one. I was about to waste precious time laying down an array of PlayStation-related story links, such as the recent announcement of a Sony handheld, several scattered tech notes on the architectural changes planned for the PS3, and the numerous obligatory PS2 hacks and mods.
> I guess as soon as it is from microsoft, it's bad
Of course not. I, for one, always assume that anything from M$ is remarkably stable and well-designed, and that their behavior in any given market keeps the associated industry vibrant and consumer-friendly.
There's not enough room in my head to store useless information, so I never bother with silly things like "historical perspective." That's why I
buy all of my Iomega gear at Best Buy, which I then promptly install on my SCO box; because, hey, every company deserves an amnesiac consumer base, right?
> GET A LIFE ! Microsoft is just some big company. All big companies do bad things.
I also find that moral equivocacy further simplifies my life. The world is so much easier to comment on when there are no degrees to consider. I like to paint everything with a giant, monochrome brush.
> That you are stupid enough to buy their stuff, that is your fault.
Finally, an assessment I can't argue with. The only thing I'm curious about, though, is this: I shouldn't be stupid enough to buy their products, but since all corporations are equally bad, what *should* I buy? You've obviously never been stupid enough to buy one of those "imperialist" consoles. But then, I guess it would be hard to play one without an imperialist television.
> They also do good things.
Quick, name one. I know: They ushered in the age of the GUI
I guess you're just referring to their superlative business ethics in general. Personally, I've always found the ISV and VAR criticisms of M$ as "inflexible" to be totally off-base. Their moral flexibility, alone, is without peer.
> Maybe it's not 'cool' to say good things about them
It's not. Still, the question is largely an academic one. We would need a good thing to report in order to put the matter to practical test, and there's very little risk of that happening.
- nocturne
/* Pleurez, pleurez, mes yeux, et fondez vous en eau! La moitie de ma vie a mis l'autre au tombeau. - Corneille */