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The Power of the Hacking Community
narramissic writes "In the world of business software, vendors routinely offer tools to help developers customize applications. Not so in the consumer space, where TiVo and Xbox are notable exceptions. This article offers and interesting look at what companies have to gain — and lose — by embracing the hacker community. From the article: 'One example is TiVo Inc., founded in 1997 to develop digital video technology that allows users to record TV shows. TiVo, based on Linux, is an extensible platform, and from its early days the company welcomed hackers and professional developers. "When we first came out no one knew what DVR was," said Richard Bullwinkle, vice president of products at entertainment networking company Mediabolic Inc., and formerly a senior member of TiVo's product marketing team. "So we made it hacker friendly."'"
Doom and Sims are perfect examples of this.
The computer industry learned this lesson long ago with the Apple ][ and IBM PC. Everything was documented - even the source to the BIOS was available. This allowed for 3rd parties to easily create software and hardware for them. People bought the machines and then all the add ons. Somewhere along the way, this lesson was completely forgotten. The various gaming consoles and the Apple iPhone being perfect examples.
They exist. They are not nearly as advanced as even the PS1 in most respects, but they exist.
The X Games Station was the first that I know of. Not terrifically powerful, but there, and designed by Andre LaMothe.
Then there is the recently released HYDRA (which I can't find the official link for) which is based on the Parallax Propeller chip which is like the Cell in that it has 8 SPEs so it's very multiprocessor but you can do all sorts of interesting things. Obviously, it's no where near as powerful though. This was also designed by Andre LaMothe.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The Linksys WRT54G is an excellent example of what could be gained by making your products "hacker-friendly" (for the original, "good" meaning of hacker).
...until Linksys basically discontinued the WRT54G as we knew it, making it hacker-unfriendly, then re-releasing the GL version for $20-30 more than you could get it initially.
Meanwhile, Buffalo Tech makes the WHM-G54(-/S), which is more or less the exact same hardware as the GL in a slightly different form factor, for cheaper than the non-L version of the Linksys router.
One of the interesting hackable Linux-based products on the European market (available in America, too, but only as a sat receiver version) is the Dreambox family of digital set-top boxes and PVRs.
Dreamboxes are DVB set-top boxes that can, depending on the model, ...
...and record the MPEG-2 Transport Stream data either to an internal HDD, or to a network share (NFS, CIFS), without restrictions. The better models have two tuners, so you can record from two MUXes simultaneously. The firmware images are Linux-based and typically have a web interface, telnet server, ssh server, busybox shell, samba server, etc. There are various unofficial, enhanced firmware images for the various Dreambox models - with user-written plugins, etc. - and a thriving (if a bit too diverse and decentralized) user community.
The manufacturer (Dream Multimedia GmbH) is supportive of unofficial development. (Hackability is one of the main selling points of their whole set-top box product range.)
In case you didn't know Tivo is at least one of the parties to blame for starting a GPL V3 by creating a novel way to simultaneously privatize a Linux-based OS and keep it out of the hands of hackers. It's called tivoization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization and it's a novel form of theft.
The summary is propaganda at best.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
doom? hardly hackable (out of the box at least) compared to quake ;)
;)
the game itself was a mess of epic proportions. but it had this built in programming language called quakeC.
in many ways ID did a stupid thing when they moved to visual-C++ and similar for quake2, as i believe a lot of people modded quake because the tools where available free of charge.
hell, try out the original firearms mod for quake. its basically a gun customization mod where you can try out different real life guns in their various incarnations. just the M4 have clip, barrel, stock and sight mods, with 3+ variants for each locations.
the later games have had limited weapon slots. i believe that quake had no such limitations...
nothing like firing up the old beast with a new binary and get some insane rendering effects
and when you can play a real time warhammer 40000 mod thats 99% faithful to the rules (using dice checks to see if you hit and so on) it just shows what people where doing back then.
still, it appears that recently there are mods like garrys mod (or something like that) for hl2, and a kind of real time nethack for doom3 (complete with random level layouts) that shows people are going back to creativity with the recent games.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Say a company created a console with the sole intent of KNOWING people were going to hack it. I can udnerstand the companies wanting to prevent people from playing downloaded ISO's, but that's not what I'm referring to. I'm refering to the Xbox DVR or Linux Box, things like that.
If word gets out into the hacking community that the new Gametron 3000 is designed in such a way to ENCOURAGE people to muck with the innards...well, it might do something good.
It isn't a console, but the GP2X linux-based portable does something much along these lines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GP2X
http://wiki.gp2x.org/wiki/Main_Page
The WRT54G and GS were NOT "hacker friendly". Do a little reading - when those boxes came out Linksys didn't say Boo about themrunning Linux. It wasn't until someone downloaded one of their firmware "updates" that they figured out it was a compressed Linux Distro! Afterwards all hell broke loose as Linksys tried to NOT honor the GPL. In the end they were not only forced to honor the GPL for the WRT54 but for several other devices too once folks started looking HARD at their firmware.
The new WRT54 boxes run another OS entirely and have less powerful hardware and less memory. Nevertheless the folks at DD-WRT have figured out how to load up Linux and get greater functionality from it - tip them please! While you're at it smack Sveasoft for dodging the GPL - grr!
Anyway, Linksys did NOT embrace the hackling community at all. They do now offer a Linux friendly WRT54 but only because people bitched when they switched to the new hardware and different OS. Try finding one of those at the local BestBuy..... The source mods are only up for their firmware becasue they were forced to do so. They did go a bit further than required and also provide a toolchain as I recall but not without arm twisting. TIVO is just as bad....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Indeed Linksys(and hence Cisco) does seem to have embraced the enhusiast modding community the NLSU2 is quite popular too.
I think the cases used in the article are poor examples of 'hacker' friendly hardware & companies. Companies like Linksys, Dream Multimedia and Gamepark(GP2X) seem much more dedicated to allowing free access to their hardware.
A lot of game developers saw the potential a long time ago and we have quite a few good games that are still great today because of it. Only thing that can be hard sometimes is to find out where to start out or indeed which hardware is open to modding.
Thankfully there's people like http://www.bsodtv.org/ to help out those who feel a bit lost.