Slashdot Mirror
The Scoop on the Xbox 360's Embedded OS?
An anonymous reader writes "When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago amid much brouhaha over its custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each, WindowsForDevices.com wondered aloud, 'What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?' Now, the website thinks it has found the answer to its question. No, it's not Linux or BSD, nor a derivative of Longhorn or Windows CE."
It's Windows 2000. What a shock, who would've guessed, I'm so exci..... ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Will this compromise hackability?
DOS
What's next? Next thing you know Apple will start using Intel chips instead. Strange days. :)
I for one am glad that /. has caught the MSM meme of rumor as news.
Please inform me when Roland Piquepaille gets a pentagon day pass.
duh! everyone knew that? Who really thought it ran anything else?
Apple (Mac OS X) runs on PowerPC chips from IBM. But now they are planning to Intel platform. PC (windows) runs on Intel platform, but XBox 360 uses PowerPC. My question is simple. WHY???
fuvoo: watch something
How can they run an XBox on Windows 3.11?? I just don't get it... Will we be required to add TCP/IP on our own if we wish to play over the network?
I can go buy it in stores? I think you mean debuted.
Really, the best way to think of it is as "The Xbox 360 OS." But if you really have to think of it in Windows terms, you could say it has roots in Windows 2000 by way of the original Xbox, albeit with sweeping changes along the way.
Wonder whether it will display 'blue screen of death' or the newly upgraded 'red screen of death'!!! http://news.com.com/2061-10805-5703006.html
...and lots of changes? *starts* Oh dear god! It's Windows ME!
They dare to mock the sacred name of Linux!
Quite honestly, there's very little story here. The XBox ran a stripped down version of Windows 2000, and the XBox 360 will run a modified version of that.
At least until someone hacks the machine.
All that fuss to say it's a simple derivative of NT, in its second generation of console-ness.
That was certainly a surprise. Oh wait, no it wasn't.
They are making the PowerPC for the Xbox and the Cell for the new Playstation. It seems like they will be the real winner in the next round of game wars.
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
The OS any machine runs is become irrelevant. I want a base OS that can run virtual machines and whatever runs on top as a Virtual OS doesn't really really matter. Similar to how Mac and OSX runs but without any legacy core that can interfere. With MS, they have the Virtual Machine on top of Windows yet if they made the Virtual Machine the OS and the run windows or whatever that would be the best of both worlds. Don't like Windows great it will run Linux, Symbian, Palm whatever and who cares lets just get the Virtual Machine running. Hm Sounds like Sun needs to extend Java to run Virtual Machines rather than running on an OS and that could complete a Virtual Machine.
Just wait some months and you will see how the baked potato box will indeed run the !#$%&@ OS =o)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
After reading TFA, what is the answer?
Chopped up version of the old Xbox OS.
Yay. What a ground breaking revelation.
I want my money back!
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
My guess is faeries. They captured a whole mess of them and have chained them to tiny little switchboards in the machine. I was going to say leprachauns, but the extra gold they carry around would make the machines too heavy.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
what- do they think we're actually going to look at the article to find out? pshah!
I was hoping it'd be something incredible and barely believable, like OS X or BeOS or Plan 9. But no, it's just a derivative of the original XBox OS. Weak. All that suspense for almost nothing. This story is worse than the ending of Citizen Kane, when "Rosebud" turned out to be his sled.
Another one bites the dust
The embedded technology in these game machinese have direct application to the guidance systems in intercontinental ballastic missiles (ICBMs). Beijing is currently in the midst of an aggressive program to modernize the Chinese military. The Chinese are eager to improve the accuracy of their ICBMs aimed at the USA.
I was hoping that it would have been a derivative of Mac OS X. Now that would have been a story worth reading (if true).
Could you imagine Microsoft getting in bed with Apple. ewww...
He just invoked Linux and the lame security measures of a M$ product in one comment. This guy should be modded into oblivion plus get /.'s first oscar.
Seeing how the DevKits were G5 boxes, wouldn't it be a good idea to look at the OS they were running?
From a hackability POV, it's the BIOS that really matters. The original xbox had the BIOS hidden in the VGA chip (or was it the Southbridge? Can't remember) but once Bunnie Huang scoped the buses everything was lost. I think we can expect to see some fairly high grade encryption at work in both the POST and code signing arenas.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
When it sez "partial backwards compatibility with XBox games"?
I mean, the XBox 360 has parts of the XBox OS, and that's all it needs to run certain XBox games...right?
Jeez.
...so here's the article text:
.
When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago amid much brouhaha over its custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each, WindowsForDevices.com wondered aloud, "What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?"
We offered a few alternatives and called on our readers for their ideas on the subject. Now, we think we have the answer to our question.
But first, a bit of background.
As we stated in our previous story on this topic, the earlier Xbox (shown at right) was based on a Pentium-family processor and was said to run a variant of Windows 2000. But the new Xbox 360 has a completely different architecture, based on a custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor along with other specialty silicon including a custom graphics processor made by ATI, plus 512MB of system DRAM (see table of specs at the bottom of this article).
Since neither Windows XP nor Windows CE supports the PowerPC architecture (Windows hasn't supported PowerPC architecture since Windows NT 4.0 SP3), we devised the following set of alternatives for the Xbox 360's embedded OS:
A hitherto unpublicized port by Microsoft of Windows XP or Windows CE to the PowerPC
A version of some off-the-shelf embedded OS, possibly even a variant of BSD Unix or #%$@& (sorry, our censors deleted the "L-word")
A new embedded software platform developed specifically for Xbox use
And the OS is...
So, which is it -- choice 1, choice 2, or choice 3?
Our readers had some interesting comments, ranging from a derivative of the "yet to be released Longhorn" to "a ported Win XP kernel" to "its own private OS that was built from the ground up for gaming." And, to no one's surprise, nobody seemed to think Microsoft would embed BSD or "#%$@&" inside its Xbox!
We also asked fellow editor and ExtremeTech technology analyst Jason Cross (and self-described "certified geek") whether he had turned up anything about the Xbox's embedded OS while he was at E3 2005. There, we seem to have struck gold. "Yes," Cross replied, he had indeed uncovered some interesting tidbits in conversations with folks both inside and outside of Microsoft. Here's what he told us . .
The original Xbox ran an OS that had its roots in Windows 2000. Granted, by the time you strip out everything that is not needed in a console like the Xbox and replace some of the parts with stuff specific to that device (like the file system), and add a few pieces, it hardly resembles anything remotely like Windows 2000 at all. But you could say that's where its original roots lie, even if 95 percent of it has been cut or heavily altered.
The Xbox 360's OS, in turn, has its roots in the OS of the original Xbox. I've been told (not by Microsoft, but by one of its hardware partners) that the Xbox absolutely positively does NOT run Linux [oops, the censors missed that one --Ed.] or Unix or some variant of that. The Xbox 360 project started with the Xbox OS the same way the Xbox project started with Windows 2000. They cut, added, and changed it in both large and small ways. It's now quite a bit different from the Xbox OS, which was itself quite a bit different from Windows 2000.
Really, the best way to think of it is as "The Xbox 360 OS." But if you really have to think of it in Windows terms, you could say it has roots in Windows 2000 by way of the original Xbox, albeit with sweeping changes along the way.
So there you have it: the Xbox 360 reportedly runs a second-order derivative of Windows 2000 that has been ported to the custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor. Well, that's what we think, anyhow.
Why does it matter?
Bear in mind, Microsoft has big plans for the home -- plans that include media center PCs, family entertainment centers, TV set-top boxes, portable media players, mobile phones, and, of course, gaming devices.
Considering that the Xbox 360 represents a powerful new computing platform that will be finding
If it runs a cut down version of Win 2k, perhaps MS should've made an x-box version of Office. In hardware terms all you'd need is a compatible keyboard/mouse and printer and your off - not sure how 'cut down the OS is though and wheter they'd need to put a bit back in.
MS might lose a bit in OS sales, but surely they'd easily make up for that with x-box & x-printer sales? Office sales might even benefit slighlty aswell considering the amount of non-chipped (non-copy compliant) x-boxes out there versus the amount of people that have pirated copies for their PC.
Haydn.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
The article had nothing of worth. It was just an advertisement dressed up to look like news. Now slashdot is shilling for Microsoft too. WOW!
Site was dead for me, so Coral Link.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Whats the big deal? The console needs an OS, but it does not really matter which it has, since the game runs most of its own stuff, and the OS is used for relatively little compaired to a general purpose PC. So, the Xbox people had a choice. And since they DO WORK for Microsoft, why not use a kernel based on their OS? A modified NT kernel makes as much sense as a Linux or BSD kernel, and this way they do not have to buy expensive IDE kits and learn new stuff, they can use MS's inhouse expertese and software.
First stripped down a win2000 OS and then completely rewrite that code to support the powerpc platform, that is to say, a custom designed powerpc. I think they just completely rewrote the OS with no roots anywhere at all. They don't need to use older code or os's now, they have had sufficient experience with the old xbox, where they had to start off with old code, even if it is stripped down to reduce development time for the product. But meanwhile like microsoft always worked, they start with crap until it generates sufficient revenue and start over with the next version that comes around. I don't think they are going about it like they used to using old code and putting it in a new jacket.
I ask this question with full sincerity: Are we going to see people writing malware for Xboxes? It's connected to the internet, and it's running Windows. What more could you possibly need? I could imagine that it probably doesn't support ports 80, 25, etc. but it could happen..
-- n
i managed to get coral cache to load it before total failure :o)
mirror
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
yet
May 24, 2005
.
When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago amid much brouhaha over its custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each, WindowsForDevices.com wondered aloud, "What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?"
We offered a few alternatives and called on our readers for their ideas on the subject. Now, we think we have the answer to our question.
But first, a bit of background.
As we stated in our previous story on this topic, the earlier Xbox (shown at right) was based on a Pentium-family processor and was said to run a variant of Windows 2000. But the new Xbox 360 has a completely different architecture, based on a custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor along with other specialty silicon including a custom graphics processor made by ATI, plus 512MB of system DRAM (see table of specs at the bottom of this article).
Since neither Windows XP nor Windows CE supports the PowerPC architecture (Windows hasn't supported PowerPC architecture since Windows NT 4.0 SP3), we devised the following set of alternatives for the Xbox 360's embedded OS:
1. A hitherto unpublicized port by Microsoft of Windows XP or Windows CE to the PowerPC
2. A version of some off-the-shelf embedded OS, possibly even a variant of BSD Unix or #%$@& (sorry, our censors deleted the "L-word")
3. A new embedded software platform developed specifically for Xbox use
And the OS is...
So, which is it -- choice 1, choice 2, or choice 3?
Our readers had some interesting comments, ranging from a derivative of the "yet to be released Longhorn" to "a ported Win XP kernel" to "its own private OS that was built from the ground up for gaming." And, to no one's surprise, nobody seemed to think Microsoft would embed BSD or "#%$@&" inside its Xbox!
We also asked fellow editor and ExtremeTech technology analyst Jason Cross (and self-described "certified geek") whether he had turned up anything about the Xbox's embedded OS while he was at E3 2005. There, we seem to have struck gold. "Yes," Cross replied, he had indeed uncovered some interesting tidbits in conversations with folks both inside and outside of Microsoft. Here's what he told us . .
The original Xbox ran an OS that had its roots in Windows 2000. Granted, by the time you strip out everything that is not needed in a console like the Xbox and replace some of the parts with stuff specific to that device (like the file system), and add a few pieces, it hardly resembles anything remotely like Windows 2000 at all. But you could say that's where its original roots lie, even if 95 percent of it has been cut or heavily altered.
The Xbox 360's OS, in turn, has its roots in the OS of the original Xbox. I've been told (not by Microsoft, but by one of its hardware partners) that the Xbox absolutely positively does NOT run Linux [oops, the censors missed that one --Ed.] or Unix or some variant of that. The Xbox 360 project started with the Xbox OS the same way the Xbox project started with Windows 2000. They cut, added, and changed it in both large and small ways. It's now quite a bit different from the Xbox OS, which was itself quite a bit different from Windows 2000.
Really, the best way to think of it is as "The Xbox 360 OS." But if you really have to think of it in Windows terms, you could say it has roots in Windows 2000 by way of the original Xbox, albeit with sweeping changes along the way.
So there you have it: the Xbox 360 reportedly runs a second-order derivative of Windows 2000 that has been ported to the custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor. Well, that's what we think, anyhow.
Why does it matter?
Bear in mind, Microsoft has big plans for the home -- plans that include media center PCs, family entertainment centers, TV set-top boxes, portable media players, mobile phones, and, of course, gaming devices.
Considering that the Xbox 360 represents a powerful new computing platfo
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
As anyone with a passion for other and more esoteric platforms will (or should) know.
Windows NT existed on a number of different architectures other than Intel x86, Including MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC, in versions 3.5 3.51 and 4.0.
The final point to make is that when the work began on Windows 2000, the entire OS was done. The full NT5 beta available from the MSDN when it was released. Did indeed include a PowerPC version as well as the others. ( at least one beta did as far as i can confirm from my discourses with other "wisened veterans" (no mater what their age) of the MS oses. )
The effort involved in MS porting the NT 5 kernel and other systems to the Xbox 360 would have been totaly comparable to the effort needed to strip and optimise the nt 5 core for the Xbox. Which is in fact a very impressive degree of refinement over the original os when you examine the finer details.
( My other boxes are FreeBSD and Solaris so dont dare call me a MS fan, XP is for my games only case wine isnt good enough and i pray it catches up sooner. )
XML - A clever joke would be here if
That was quick http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/0951c3afc97aabe88 56ee7318783d45d/index.html
The obvious answer hasn't been mentioned yet: OS\360 (especially since it is running on an IBM processor).
Thanks for spoiling the ending of the movie for those of us that haven't had a chance to see it yet.
"yesterday development company Factor 5 helped Sony fire another blow to Microsoft's camp by declaring allegiance to the Playstation 3. President Julian Eggebrecht told News.com that the Playstation 3 offered more processing power to more easily simulate the real world for a better game experience. The company had previously stated that it would work on the Xbox 360."
No matter what hype they spin, developers have been grumbling about the Xbox 360 design from day one as the specs were released, and now dev's are already giving up on it before it even begins! It is going to be a bear to program for (on par with the Saturn/PS2), (as can be seen from the amount already running on PS3 which is farther behind in production) So far the only thing to be said for the Xbox is by RARE (who MS bought out for Kameo, which has been scrapped twice) and all they have said is how many characters they can get onscreen at once... Yawn. The graphics look like PS2 or mid-high PC at best.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
"The original Xbox ran an OS that had its roots in Windows 2000. Granted, by the time you strip out everything that is not needed in a console like the Xbox and replace some of the parts with stuff specific to that device (like the file system), and add a few pieces, it hardly resembles anything remotely like Windows 2000 at all. "
So, in other words, it runs DOS 5.1
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
And yet you managed to post this within a minute of the article being published.
Before any liberals are tempted to mod up one of my comments, a word of warning: I'm actually making fun of you.
That's right, the OS is actually MS's old friend OS/2 WARP.
Who, except for /. crowd, expects Microsoft adopts Linux for one of their strategic pieces? Windows has the HAL that can absorb hardware differences, so there's no room for Linux and the like.
B ;-)
We are the Borg...
'What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?'
All electronic computing devices run on smoke. Because once you let the smoke out, it quits working.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Say it with me:
Norton Internet Security For XBOX....
Guaranteed to drop your framerates by 75%
Of course, it can second as a "game genie" effect by slowing the whole system down enough to make it boringly easy.
or...
How long until we've got 100,000 XBOX drones spamming and breaking into networks?
do() || do_not();
Excuse me, my dreamcast called, it's OS wants a few words with you guys.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Doesn't the "360" in XBox 360 refer to the number of reboots it takes after loading patches before the games will run?
Everything is a derivative of NT or CE now.
in some form or other.
9x was axed a long time ago.
tell us something new!
We all know that m$ can't do anything decent in a short period of time (and there's considerable doubt that they can do anything decent in any amount of time.)
So the obvious answer is either they bought or 'appropriated' the software from someone else.
My guess would be Beos.
I look at MS and how they bought Virtual PC and have spent a lot of R&D on the product. They've spent a lot of time and money for a niche product. Maybe emulation is part of the plan. Use an emulation layer to put any MS OS or other software on the PPC chips.
Hummmmmmmm...
Maybe next Microsoft will use this verison to go after the Mac OS.
> Thanks for spoiling the ending of the movie for those of us that haven't had a chance to see it yet.
The movie came out in 1941 for God's sake! How long do you expect everyone to tiptoe around you?
Oh, and the Planet of the Apes is the future Earth.
Bruce Willis? Dead.
Kaiser Sose? Verbal.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
The original XBox ran NT Embedded using the NT5 kernel. The new XBox runs NT Embedded using the NT5 kernel. Why is this a surprise?
It's Power PC? So? They had a Power PC NT kernel, for the CHRP motherboards, and most of the NT kernel is C and C++ and has to be portable at least to Alpha and Itanium, so building most of it for Power PC would be just a recompile. It's not like the software just vanished when the CHRP 'market' collapsed.
Or some derivitive/cousin/hybrid thereof.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
"I've been told (not by Microsoft, but by one of its hardware partners) that the Xbox absolutely positively does NOT run Linux or Unix..."
:D
Somehow, I doubt that. It may not run it now, but I suspect that an enterprising team of geeks will Make It Work.
Didn't MS and billg say that stripping down the OS like this was impossible due to integration issues in a court of law? Did someone mislead the court? Or am I mistaken?
Anyway, this is just one more project branch to maintain. They now have Win2K, WinXP Home Edition, WinXP Pro, Win2003 server, WinCE and now another version for the XBox. For the server editions they need to support standard, enterprise and data center versions. And I think there is a version for the tablet PC, or is it just WinCE? No wonder MS wants cheaper code monkeys, keeping all the versions maintained and in synch has got to be a labor intensive nightmare.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
for a number of reasons to start with as a code base. Moreso considering they're interacting with an IBM processor. There's still enough of the OS/2 code base involved in Windows 2000 and W2K is by far one of the most stable versions of Windows to date. So, start with a mature and stable codebase and work from there. Gamers DEMAND stability. Blue screens, won't be tolerated by the community so MS knows it's got to get it's proverbial engineering act together to not self-destruct in the marketplace.
Scientia et Potentia
It's a game console. It plays games. As long as it plays games well, does it matter if it's windows, a derivative of windows, or flying pixies?
If the sole purpose of my computer was for playing games, then I wouldn't care if it was run by windows, linux, or hampsters, as long as it did that well. My objection to using windows for my desktop is that I do all my computer related stuff on it (pvr, software dev, internet, etc) and because of that, for me, window's crap runs down its leg far too often for my liking and I'm left trying to clean up the mess.
Given the fact that this new XBox, from a business point of view, should be able to play the games from the first XBox, means it will have an OS that is very similar to the first.
I'm not shocked it's based on the one that was based on win 2k. But really, what are you going to do with your xbox other than play games? surf for porn? If it's based on IBMs processor, at least it wouldn't be affected by wintel spyware.
The article states that they have no idea - they have asked Microsoft, and have had no response.
/. story, which talks of "the scoop" and says the website "thinks it has the answer"?
How does that add up to the
Does it run on Linux?
First off, it was pretty obvious that MS were going to use existing code on the original XBOX, if only because it was to all intents and puropses a PC. So at the time MS had the choice between using a Win 9X codebase, a CE codebase or NT/2000 codebase.
.NET or Avalon.
Windows 9X compatibility wasn't a requirement so could be ignored, CE was optimised for lower power CPUs and had been a less than a stellar success in the Dreamcast, whilst the NT/2000 codebase was optimised for higher end processors x86/PPC/MIPS/Alpha. It would seem that the choice was obvious. I dare say that MS stripped it down so that it's just the kernel of 2000 with thin wrappers of DirectX on top of the drivers together with a the minimum requirements of Win32 to keep DirectX and OpenGL running.
If we jump ahead to now, it seems obvious that MS would carry on using the same platform - just this time using the PPC branch of 2000, build new drivers and probably add more Win32 stuff to support the XNA architecture. If anything it seems unthinkable that they would use anything but an NT kernel.
I would be more interested to know if Win360 (I know this is Slashdot and Microsoft is only interesting when it's monopolising the cure for cancer etc - but just allow me to wonder a moment!) supports
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
"Rosebud" was the sled? ...
NOOOOoooooooOOO!
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
I bet its just Disinformation to thwart modders for a few more months then it would take them to figure out how to mod the xbox 360.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
It's a mutated OS running on a triple-core CPU... it's... it's... it's Ghidrah!
I knew it was only a matter of time before websites became sentient!
OK, so it's a Windows 2000 derivative...
which is an OS/2 derivative...
which is based on the Mach kernel...
which is pretty much BSD/QNX/UNIX based...
OH MY GOSH! IT'S RUNNING UNIX!
I'm glad I've seen all of those movies, but thanks for ruining fun movies for those who, for whatever reason, haven't seen them yet. There are a lot of people who haven't seen "Citizen Kane," and I was one of them until just a few years ago. I don't know what kind of powerless existence you lead, but apparently you're doing your best to extend it to as many people as possible. Oh, but you have no life so you've seen the IMDB top 250 several times over. Congratulations, you get to be king nerd for the next 5 minutes..
> Congratulations, you get to be king nerd for the next 5 minutes
But Andy Warhol promised I'd get 15 minutes...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Three 3.2ghz processors? Wow. That's some pretty cool hardware specs. Pretty impressive. But it all means jack if they don't have the titles.
MadOgre.com
yet. Just wait until its in our hands...
All Your Memory Are Belong To Java
'Rosebud' refers to his wife's naughty bits. This in no way helps the movie to make sense, though.
(I don't normally use or condone expressions like 'naughty bits' but I can't remember offhand if
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I didn't see any evidence that the XBOX 360 OS is based on Windows 2000.
My guess is that it's based on Darwin, or Darwin's BSD core which should be free to use.
IMO, that explains how XBOX game-demos can run on Power Mac G5 computers (as seen on AnandTech).
MS has "borrowed" code from BSD before (for Win 2000, if I remember correctly).
I don't need a signature.
"No, it's not Linux or BSD"
well, of course not.. it is, afterall, a MICROSOFT XBox...
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
I thought that the X-Box 360 would be running IBM's once-popular mainframe OS and an ancestor of the current "z-OS" of the IBM z-Series mainframes, OS/360
You can take out pretty much all of the OS. However, you'll discover that things are interdependant. You turn off one component, a lot of others that rely on it will be turned off as well.
Its really running on the Atari 800XL architecture.
hahaha, mod me a troll all you want and all the claims that "I have no industry inside contacts," but Midway has just announced publicly they have not interest in Xbox 360!
Midway to support PS3 at launch, but not Xbox 360
Time for a number of you to piss off now, realize developers are not supporting the Xbox.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
The GC is still not sold at a loss, the PS3's video is from ATI, not nVidia, and Sega did make money on consoles at one point. Then they decided to release 3 or 4 consoles nobody wants per year, that is what put them where they are now.
And slashdot sucks for putting in captchas for logged in users.
The article states that there are no Microsoft operating systems for the PowerPC architecture. This is only partly true. NT was designed to run on pretty much any processor or architecture provided you write a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) for that processor/architecture.
This feature was thrown into NT because its original developers wanted to make it portable to any architecture. NT is a very nice (micro)kernel. It's simple, modular, and very portable. It's such a shame that the software, shells and user interfaces that Microsoft develops to run on it are so bad. I might not agree with Microsoft's marketing department, but I know that their NT kernel team are fucking hardcore. Mainly because the project wasn't taken seriously by Microsoft while it was being developed and the coders were pretty much left to their own devices. Disclaimer: I run Linux on my servers.
Anyone know what the PS3 will run?
Celebrate the finer things in life
Just because MS doesn't have a monopoly in every single market (yet), doesn't mean they don't have a monopoly. The problem with the xbox is that they are using the billions of dollars they made from their OS monopoly to push their way into other markets.
is such a good idea because M$ wants to piss of EVERY hardware partner to grab the 2 people who buy Apples but like Windows better?
Whaddya mean "3 for 3"? As we all know, the Phantom is running on commodity x86 hardware! It'll be out any day now with a vast library of games, really...
The ps2 and gamecube both made money at first, and are at least sold at cost now. It was just the xbox that was sold for much less than it cost to make.
You know...
You almost made me run to the store. WHEW.
Didn't they argue up and down that they couldn't get rid of explorer from Win2K? Maybe some regulator should take note!
Then again, maybe nobody believed them then either.
One thing that I am interested in is the bit depth of the operating system itself.
I'm assuming that the PowerPC cores being used in the new XBox are based on IBM's 970 or 970MP designs. Although I haven't seen any source positively put that theory to rest, it seems to make sense.
That said, the 970 core is a fully 64-bit processor with a 32-bit bridge mode.
I'm wondering... will the 2000 variant Microsoft is deploying be pure 64-bit, or 32-bit? Microsoft's AMD64 offering supports both ABI's, but I'm not seeing the need to do so for their new console. 64-bit seems excessive, seeing as how no games will never see more than 512MB of memory and the PowerPC offers 64-bit math instructions for added FLOP precision without all the overhead of 64-bit pointers.
And before anyone points out that AMD64 code is faster than x86 code, please remember that this is because AMD64 code isn't just 64-bit x86 code - it adds additional register and intstructions IIRC. The PowerPC, on the other hand, was always designed for 64-bit operation, and as a result, the instrucitons and register counts are the same in both modes - the 64-bit mode just adds the overhead of extra data on the bus and actually degrades performances slightly over equivelent 32-bit operation.
Will definately be interesting. It's pretty much assumed that they'll be having to run the XBox1 games they plan to support in emulation, so I can't see how that would effect their choice.
Cross financing is absolutely normal and fine.
You could also whine that sony financed their battle against sega and nintendo with the billions made by selling TVs and walkmen...
Just a reminder: abuse of monopoly would be if microsoft gave large discount for an xbox with each windows liscense, or somethink like that.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The "L-word" ???
...Microsoft will soon abandon the i386 platform. New platform for Windows will be the Cell. First large-scale beta test started in may 2005.
And I explained clearly that MS has a monopoly in the PC OS market. Then I complained that they are using that to try to take over another market. I didn't say that's what makes them have a monopoly, I said they already have the monopoly, and are now abusing it to push into other markets.
And you certainly could say that about sony, if they had sold the playstation or ps2 for a loss, but they didn't
It's Xbox360, which was Xbox, which was Windows 2000, which was Windows NT, which was... VMS. How many VAXMIPS does the X360 run? And where's my DCL interpreter?
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make install -not war
"The problem with the xbox is that they are using the billions of dollars they made from their OS monopoly to push their way into other markets."
Despite that, they still didn't take the market over. At the end of the day, they still have to create a product that people want. If they succeed at that, that is NOT the definition of a monopoly.
Frankly, the assertion that MS used 'monopoly money' to fund the XBOX is dubious at best. It's based on the assumption that MS made every single penny off of Windows (or Office) because of a monopoly. This is not true by a long shot. MS had to become a monopoly before it could use that power to maintain a monopoly. Windows is a de-facto monopoly. (It's actually stated in the court ruling that MS wasn't guilty of creating a monopoly, just for trying to maintain it. Everybody around here seems to have skipped over that part.)
This isn't relevent anyway. The 'problem' isn't that MS has a monopoly in a different market, the problem is that Microsoft has deep pockets. Sony does, too. That's why they spent 2 billion dollars developing the PS2. That's nearly half the money Nintendo has in the bank. I can't believe you guys are all apeshit over the XBOX but you're completely ignoring the BIGGEST 'threat'. Sony is DOMINATING the market. Not only have they squeezed out Sega, but they've also put up a barrier that even MS couldn't crack. They put out the most inferior hardware, yet they sold the most. Where's the anti-Sony pitchforks, mmm? You're ALL so busy spelling MS with a dollar sign that you're not actually paying attention to what's really happening around you.
Don't tell me I don't understand what a monopoly is and that you do. Sony's creating one right under your nose, but you're all busy being led by your biases.
"Derp de derp."
But could explain the wealth of one Bill Gates...
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Peace
...Soylent Green is people.
The PS2 was most certainly not a cheap DVD player in japan, it wasn't even a cheap DVD player in north america. You could already get a DVD player for less when it launched in japan, and when it launched in north america.
And the random rumor you are quoting was that MS needed to sell 4 games to make a profit, not sony. Sony learned the painful lesson about crappy launch titles because nobody bought PS2's at launch, not because people bought them as DVD players.
XENIX!
"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?" --Yoda {whips out green light saber}
My post was specifically saying that MS DOES HAVE A MONOPOLY, and that not managing to take over a totally seperate market on their first product doesn't magically remove the monopolies they do have in other markets.
If you don't agree with what I said, feel free to make some claim to the contrary. But simply ignoring what I said makes me ignore you.
Didn't MS and billg say that stripping down the OS like this was impossible due to integration issues in a court of law?
"No."
What he said was that he couldn't just strip down the desktop version and still have something that would work. And that was pretty much correct though completely meaningless... they'd have to both strip out the HTML control and either modify applications that used it or back up to a previous version of those applications. Which they could easily have done if they were actually interested in cooperating. But in a narrow legalistic technical sense that completely ignores the way people normally use language, he was correct.
I know for sure that Linux was used during the development of the new XBOX hardware. They used it to run a lot of the hw design software.
Now that these applications are out in the open, MS has an obligation to keep the IE control in the OS.
Microsoft also has an obligation to provide a secure desktop environment, and the API that the HTML control uses makes that almost impossible. They need to redesign the API (yes, they really do) to put the application in charge of access to and privileges of HTML components in a much more direct way, so that an application that needs to provide a complete sandbox can do it. Splitting the control up into HTML display, active content components, and internet access components would have allowed them to satisfy the intent of the consent decree (since the HTML control would no longer by itself be a web browser) as well as maintaining the facilities that other applications need. AND it would significantly improve security, since the "web browser front end" would be able to simply leave the un-sandboxed active content components out of its instance of the display component.
This is pretty much what I expected Microsoft to start working on back around 1997, after the first security failures. Boy, was I naive.
The Quick and Dirty OS sold to IBM by a man who dumpster dived previous "works". Remember though, without him, you would not have such quality code deluging the market. Two decades later, he's still pushing the same codebase, despite twice declaring it dead.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
So, if it wasn't a surprise that this was based on the NT kernel, how many other dev's thought of that too, and maybe even malware dev's? :P
Would it be possible, since the 360 is so "live" (aka internet) reliant, that we will have spyware and popup problems for xbox? Or do you think that they "hacked" off the parts that made them vulnerable...
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to govern any other" -John Ada
Seriously, if down the road someone hacks Linux onto this thing, I wonder if the CPU is compatable-enough with the G4/G5 to run OS X under Mac-On-Linux?
That'd be kinda cool, it a geeky sort of way.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
I just hope this gives a Green screen of death. The Blue one is so cliche. I think we all need something a little different
Yeah, I've had a couple ideas for the story arcs of some RTSs, and I have the coding knowledge to at least make a decent effort at some form of game enginge, but I can't draw for crap. Finding someone who can and is willing to copyleft their work is worse than the needle/haystack bit.
Not windows? then its not like a computer or anything rite? good i hate computers. whats a linux? sounds pretty ghey.
"So there you have it: the Xbox 360 reportedly runs a second-order derivative of Windows 2000 that has been ported to the custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor. Well, that's what we think, anyhow."
Hardly newsworthy if you ask me.
I understand exactly what you're saying, but I still stand by my original post. I think your argument, if it were really of the utmost importance, would only help explain why it "makes no sense to look at alternatives to Microsoft" as solutions.
I say that because, given your kitchen analogy - any reasonable chef would opt for the brand of kitchen that offered him/her the most options and compatibility with other people's kitchens. He/she would be primarily concerned with such issues as recipes working even though he/she obtained them from other sources.
In today's world of computers, that means Microsoft and Windows. (If I choose my OS based upon concerns like being compatible with almost any software package my neighbor might give me/sell me/loan me, or based upon having the maximum number of choices available to me in a retail outlet - Windows is it.)
Of course, quite a few of us would say "Woah! Wait a minute now! I don't WANT Windows at all!" That's probably true - but then that means there are other factors influencing that decision... not the factors you speak of in your analogy.
That is exactly the picture that Microsoft would be trying very hard to create in your mind, yes.
;)
Say "Foo Kitchens" has 80% market share, is built into every new home by default (unless you specify something else before they start), is supported by most appliance manufacturers, has the biggest recipe and tool market etc.
But "Foo Kitchens" uses cheap wood for their cupboards, has a history of selling food that rots three times as quickly as the competition, the fridge needs to be de-iced twice a week etc. And, on top of it all, you need to buy lots of chemicals to take care of the regular woodworm and ant epidemics.
No wonder that people are not satisfied with it and many look for alternatives. Many turn to different kitchen companies that might not have such a big market share, and such a big third party share (who needs sixteen kinds of white flour, or a dozen different ways to mash potatoes, anyway?).
Or you can build your own kitchen, there are a lot of HOWTOs available on the 'net.
I'm sure there are still holes to this analogy, but I'm still pretty convinced it's still a valid analogy.
Jens
Home Page
I just want to know how long will it take an XBox 360 to get MacOSX running on it. That would be a ton better than a mac mini.
For example, Battlefield 2, due... soon.
Behind Gamecube, globally. North Americanly, definately second, but not by a huge margin.
win.init alongtimeago]
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[somesectioniforgo
shell=cmd.com
remember how steam was impossible to crack and it worked really well as an online distribution method just like you describe
The most obvious point to make is that AMD's x86 chips are quite superior to Intel's...
.NET applications don't seem to be x86, but a JIT-compiled bytecode. Certainly suggests M$ plans to drop x86 sometime.
In regards to dropping x86 altogether: Apple wrote a m68k user-mode emulator years ago when they moved to PPC; qemu allows user-mode emulation on Linux systems; M$ may be evil, but I think they're perfectly capable of writing a x86 Windows-user-mode emulator.
Also,
Luke-Jr
Nowhere does it claim that the PS2 was cheaper than a DVD player, BECAUSE ITS NOT TRUE. Just that people over 30 bought it *mostly* for movies, and that DVD players were more expensive in japan than the states. See, people bought it because it wasn't much more expensive than a DVD player they would have bought anyways, and they could still play the occasional game on it.
And if you read the article you posted, the doom and gloom predictions were because the PS2 didn't have much for games at launch, and there were component shortages so they couldn't produce as many as they wanted. They made money on PS2s, and wanted to make more but couldn't because they couldn't make enough of them.
And of course the 4 games is a random number that was chosen for that particular rumor, which was about the xbox. What does the article have to do with anything, it doesn't mention this rumor. People claimed various things about how much MS was losing per xbox, but the fact is they never said how much they lose, just that it loses money, therefore its a rumor.
All three consoles were going to have ATI GPUs at one point. Guess I should have read the ps3 bullshit from E3.
No, my post said that using the money from their monopoly in the OS market to sell a product at a loss in another market is the problem. Read it, that really is what it says, and everyone who can read english can see this, including you.
Being too fucking dense to read what you are replying to is bad enough, but being so arrogant as to pretend you are being ignored because you aren't participating in group think is beyond rediculous. Wake up, nobody wants to try to converse with someone who will only ignore what they say and continue arguing with straw men and red herrings.
You decided based on your own twisted view of the world that I am some anti-MS crusader. This is obvious from you complaining about "people like me" using a dollar sign in MS, despite me not doing that, and telling me to complain about Sony, when Sony isn't doing what MS is.
And just so you know, I hate Sony. They have a hidden control panel in their monitors (at least some models) that you can only access using a special cable and special software, which of course only sony authorized repair centers can get. So if there is a power surge and your monitors contrast gets set WAY too high (above what you can even set with the user control panel) then you have to pay $250 for some overpaid fuckstick to plug in a cable and press "reset to factory settings" on this gay software. While I am not a huge fan of MS, because of this monitor scam I outright despise Sony.
But that doesn't change the fact that MS is a convicted monopolist using money from a monopoly that has held PC technology back for years to push their way into a new market with a product that loses money. Why would you expect everyone to be complaining about Sony when they aren't doing this, and MS is?
If you don't believe me, just pop a Konsole on it and type "uname -a"; there it is, right in front of you:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I love the frothing at the mouth linux geek thing, you do it so well.
Despite early rumours that the reason for Bill G's wealth was the fact that he caught a leprachaun, it just turned out to be Steve Balmer in his payamas..
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
What makes my head spin is that as soon as both Sony AND Microsoft announce they are definitely using IBM PowerPC CPUS, Apple is rumoured to be switching to Intel because the PowerPC stuff isn't "fast enough".
These game systems tell me that PowerPC has a LOT of scalability especially in the way of multi-core unit. I think the Intel/Apple story is BS (as usual).
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!