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Xbox Originator: "Stupid, Stupid Xbox!!"
Freshly Exhumed writes "You can't begrudge Nat Brown for claiming some pride in the birth of Microsoft's game console: 'I was a founder of the original xBox project at Microsoft and gave it its name. Almost 14 years after the painful, pointless, and idiotic internal cage-match to get it started and funded, the hard selling of a compelling and lucrative living-room product to Bill (and then Steve as he began to take over), a product that consumers would want and love and demand, I am actually still thrilled to see how far it has come...' But in his recent ILIKE.CODE blog post he is driven to lament that '...as usual, Microsoft has jumped its own shark and is out stomping through the weeds planning and talking about far-flung future strategies in interactive television and original programming partnerships with big dying media companies when their core product, their home town is on fire, their soldiers, their developers, are tired and deserting, and their supply-lines are broken.' Nat goes on to detail a list of Microsoft's past and present strategic Xbox blunders, while tossing some barbs towards Nintendo's and Sony's game console strategies."
It's the interface. It sucks. I bought a machine to game on, not one to sell me other crap. Two years ago when they changed to pre metro I boxed up the x-box and games and gave it to my nephews.
X-Box is doomed. Simply because it's not about gaming, but all about sales.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
He'll try to convince them to can this stupid idea of linking all game purchases with a single xbox live account, and getting rid of the stupid "always-on" DRM requirement.
... wait, what?
Didn't think i would ever say this...but have to admit Bill gates leaving MS was NOT the best thing to happen to MS. Srsly though ballmer is just pushing the MS car down the cliff.
The appstore model of shitty games selling at a couple of bucks works for developers and apple because there are 400 million ios devices sold to date. With only 70 million xbox 360's this model would fail miserably.
You must be new here. We have a Microsoft bitch-fest everyday even if they don't make anything newsworthy. It's either a Windows 8 post, or some rumour about DRM on the xbox, or Stallman saying something dumb, or something about UEFI, and if all those fail then we find some random guy that quit a decade ago and writes a butthurt blog post.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
Oh look, it's another retired general bitching about how much better things were when he led the army. File this one under W for 'Wozniak'.
The number 1 issue I have with MS and Xbox is that even after paying around $60 a year for their service I still get bombarded with advertisements covering upwards of HALF my f*cking screen!!! Where the hell is the money going if it's not going towards paying to have a clean, ad-free service?
The ones about UEFI annoy me the most. Too many people, even on slashdot of all places, think UEFI is just a graphical addon to BIOS that also adds DRM. It's nothing of the sort, most existing UEFI systems on OEM computers have a text based configuration tool and don't even secure boot. (Windows 8 mandates the change of the later of course.) Further, BIOS also had DRM capability.
UEFI is a complete replacement of BIOS. BIOS had a ton of restrictions related to all sorts of things, e.g. partition count and size on the bootable hard disk, BIOS requires POST (which in modern systems needlessly adds to the boot time) as well as a ton of reserved and now useless for decades interrupts. These new things that you find with UEFI (e.g. graphical configuration tool) are simply new features that UEFI allows for, but aren't required.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
If there is a more obvious piece of astroturf anywhere I'd love to see it. But the bit about loving what you can do with the Xbox you don't actually own is almost as classic as mentioning Smart Glass and capitalizing it.
Few things make you seem as ignorant as when you insist on typing "X-Box" instead of "Xbox". I'm the biggest fucking grammar Nazi on the planet, but "Xbox" is a fixed string as it's a trademark. It doesn't matter if it "should" be "X-Box" or "X-box" or whatever -- it's *a fact* that it's "Xbox".
Because of DirectX, duh.
xbox only works as an extender to your network if you're running all windows 7 machines (probably works on 8, never seen 8 in the wild though). last count i'm running 1 windows 7 box out of about 8 computers. i don't really care to pay for windows to install an OS i don't like just so it's compatible with gaming hardware that might be able to replace $50 bucks worth of raspberry pi equipment.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
yeah, the more they overdo the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain..
seriously, the bootloader on modern hardware doesn't need all that bullshit.. it just needs to load a binary image and execute it. If a more advanced bootloader is needed, just use the bios loader to chainload in place of the OS kernel. The rest of UEFI is fluff. Your other complaints about outdated POST are easily remedied without making the whole stack suck.
While I am as much a grammer pedant as the next person (don't get me started on "X-Windows") it is interesting to note that Nat Brown, who "gave it its name", writes "xBox" througout except when talking directly about the product. Perhaps we are seeing the difference between the product as conceived by a visionary and the product as delivered by Marketing.
I have never found myself comfortable with any gaming consoles. My fingers have never been able to get the hang of the consoles. I think the future, the human race will be divided into 4 groups of evolved species with differing hand configurations - the consolers, the keyboarders, the swipers and the rest of the world. Let the games begin!
Ok, these are the ACTUAL complaints in the article:
1) Microsoft has purposefully locked out small developers from contributing to XBox.
2) Cluttered interface that bombards the user with unnecessary and confusing pop-ups.
3) Apple may be able to get control of the console business if they open up their Apple Store ecosystem to Apple TV
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the pinnacle of console gaming, on any platform - and it was particularly good on the Xbox.
I think the classic geek mistake is being made here... that just because it isn't right for them, it's not right for anyone.
That's not a geek mistake; it's a selfish turd mistake.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Oh look, it's another retired general bitching about how much better things were when he led the army. File this one under W for 'Wozniak'.
The Woz probably isn't the best comparison: In this rant, the guy who kicked off MS' Xbox strategy is complaining about how MS is fucking up Xbox strategy. In the case of Wozniak, Apple's original hardware-hacker-geek occasionally laments the fact that a company that bears almost no resemblance to the "Apple" of his era except the name now produces products that don't even pretend to be interested in the likes of him.
You do realize that, while Hypertransport vs. FSB was a hilariously lopsided contest(and one of the reasons that even the most Intel-friendly OEMs were forced to start shipping Opteron servers in the multi-socket segement), all remotely recent Intel silicon(except Atom, which is off marching very slowly in its own direction) use QPI and integrated memory controllers? It took them long enough; but recent AMD and recent Intel CPUs again have substantially the same layout in terms of interface bandwidth and placement of system RAM.
UEFI is a complete replacement of BIOS
Open Firmware replaces BIOS and avoids legacy cruft, and doesn't seek to prevent people doing what they want with their computer. Ironically, it's been used extensively by Apple.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's interesting to see the person who named it format the name - properly, I assume - as xBox, not XBox or Xbox. I rarely see it in the correct style, but it hasn't registered before, unlike the Mac/MAC or iPod/IPod/Ipod errors I see all too often.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
most existing UEFI systems on OEM computers have a text based configuration tool and don't even secure boot. (Windows 8 mandates the change of the later of course.)
I'll have to check, but I'm fairly sure my home PC doesn't have secure boot, yet it does have Win8 on it.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
From a media perspective, it's a pretty simple extender - in the same vein that DLNA is supposed to do most of this too. My issues:
1. I need to have a Windows machine on at all times I want to use the extender piece on the xbox because Windows Media Center has to be running to give the files to the machine.
2. Windows Media Center doesn't appear to convert a lot of things in my library to a format readable by the xbox; hence I never use the xbox as an extender.
I have had similar experiences on #2 for DLNA. Even trying to put together some of the applications (again, windows machine + transcoding is supposed to work here) DLNA just doesn't fit the bill. I have relegated myself to the fact that if I want to be able to play everything without messing around, a low-cost PC running media player classic is the way to go. Just built an i3 for my basement in fact because my old single core athlon couldn't decode anything higher than 720p without becoming a mess, even with hardware video decoding.
Karnal
You know, I saw a commercial for a Surface last night. It depicted a bunch of 20-something misanthropes at "work" doing something that could be likened to having epileptic seizures on a conference room table, tossing their tablets about as if they were frisbees and displaying facial expressions like my dog makes when it's trying to take a crap.
In the time since then, I still have no idea what Surface is, does, or how it would help my organization get anything done. All I remember are a bunch of idiots acting like idiots and not doing any work.
It's like they were *trying* to sell this device, whatever it is, to business, by appealing to the worse type of employee imaginable. That doesn't seem like much of a success strategy to me.
Seriously, watch a couple of these commercials and tell me that there is a clear message about how this thing is actually useful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7UlE-o8DQQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr3dFSzh1yU
Maybe I'm just old and unhip and still believe that going to work is for working.
"Open Firmware replaces BIOS and avoids legacy cruft, and doesn't seek to prevent people doing what they want with their computer."
Neither does UEFI.
If you want people to take you seriously, stop suggesting ignorant things.
"seriously, the bootloader on modern hardware doesn't need all that bullshit..."
Just what is "all that bullshit"? People that make these comments have no idea.
"The rest of UEFI is fluff. "
Point out some of this "fluff" specifically.
Specifics please? Graphical UIs in setup have nothing to do with UEFI. What are these "mind-boggling" UEFI implementations?
You tribalists are pathetic.
It's the XBox360 that sucks, frankly.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No. I run the Plex media server on my Mac and it streams videos to my Xbox and my Roku just fine. And, I run Microsoft Smartglass on my iPhone to control my Xbox.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
With shameless promotion like that, Microsoft might just send you an XBox, gratis, in exchange for a product endorsement!
Yes, it does need "all that bullshit." Booting from anything except an on-board hard disk controller on a PC BIOS is a hackjob. It's just an absolutely horrible clusterfuck. The fact that it ever works at all is a testament to the hard work put in over the past 20+ years by all the bootable expansion card makers.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but your comment really makes me think that you've never used anything except a desktop PC. In the server world, you always boot from an expansion card -- note that onboard NICs count as expansion cards in this context, because the BIOS can't boot from them directly; it has to pass control to the NIC's BIOS, which handles PXE -- at least once in the server's life to kickstart it. And there are a good number of situations where you never boot from a local hard disk. That's not just PXE. It also includes iSCSI and FC HBAs, ROMs or flash devices, RAID controllers, and probably a raft of things that I've simply never encountered.
I think that OpenBoot would've been a better choice than UEFI, personally. But I don't think any knowledgeable person can dispute the need for something better than the 1980s-era PC BIOS.
i never claimed to have run the army. at best i was a grunt-turned-sergeant-awkwardly-promoted-to-captain who had the ears of the generals because i knew what we could build, who could build it, and i could describe it to everybody - i was boots on the ground. i'm just pointing out that i think the current strategy is wrong and will likely fail, not that i was running it better back in the day.
n@
Are you that pompous ass at every party who feels the need to brag to everyone "I don't even OWN a TV"?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'd be thrilled, except that I still have at least $200 invested in PS3 Rock Band DLC alone.
-David
If he wanted to get another point across he shouldn't have wrote the article like an angry ex.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
gee I wish I could play this with my friend
That's why the Xbox 360 console has multiple USB ports for connecting wired controllers and a built-in receiver for pairing multiple wireless controllers. PCs can technically do that too, but it's not traditionally done. The selection of games that support multiplayer on one machine is consoles' big advantage over PCs.
Prototype 2 did it right; it loads your most recent save and starts playing it in the background under the menu. When you click 'continue,' the menu simply goes away and there you are.
Animal Crossing series does almost the same thing: its attract mode shows NPCs walking around in your campaign's town. But because it supports up to four characters in a campaign, it cuts away to the menu to select a character after you press Start.
maybe your linux box will have some awesome graphics to play games on
Yeah, like, Team Fortress 2, Counter strike Source, and MORE SHIT IS COMING.
Anything that isn't violent like the popular first-person shooters?
Open Firmware replaces BIOS and avoids legacy cruft, and doesn't seek to prevent people doing what they want with their computer.
Neither does UEFI.
UEFI is used in Windows RT devices with no ability to disable Secure Boot and no ability to enable custom mode.
Microsoft requires Secure Boot (with a disable option and custom mode) for x86 and x86-64 PCs that ship with Windows 8 and for motherboards that carry the Windows 8 certification mark, not necessarily all PCs that are upgraded from an older operating system to Windows 8.
Plus why should I pay $15 for a title on my xbox when I can get the same game cheaper on four other platforms for less?
Are these smartphone or tablet platforms? If so, then you probably didn't get a gamepad unless the platform was Android and the device was Xperia Play. Or are these console platforms? If so, then they lack anything like the $1, $3, and $5 games in the Indie Games section.
His main gripe seems to be around the 10,000$ fee to be able to develop xbox content.
While I get his point that they might be excluding many young innovative Indy game developers, they are also protecting themselves from the 99% that are not but would try to develop some crap anyway. This way you only get those people that are really serious about making a game. I mean for a start up business, 10,000$ for access to sell your product to HOW many users, is not a big deal. It is to make sure that only quality games are being submitted not halfassed ones.
It is the same reason why they have to prohibitive update fees. First one is free, and then they get progressively more expensive the more you do. Some have said this leads to developers giving up on code because they will never realize the profit from it. However the incentive is clear: STOP MAKING BUGGY CODE! Test your shit before you submit it, do not rush development and then submit some half assed, half finished dreck.
As for content, I think they are going generally in the right direction. However it shouldn't be xbox making deals with content creators, that is what players like Netflix and the like should do. Yes they could tone down the ads a bit. I get it, you are a business and want to sell me stuff. However chill out a bit ya? I dissagree about the them not capitalizing on kenict. I think they did they best they could. As a technology, it is not precise enough for serious gaming, but is great for fun party type games. The difficulty was that people interested in those kind of games bought a Nintendo. They did try to drop the price to compete with this, but then again building a catalog of that type of games takes a bit of time. If they could refine the control, I think that would be the future. Bottom line, when the next console comes out, it is likely going to cost like 500$, people interested in casual gaming do not want to spend 500$, it is that simple. So until you refine the control, and have the use for casual party games, do not expect huge sales, until of course your console prices drop to matching the low end, which is years and years away from initial release.
Anyway back to the fees. Microsoft is worth like 30 Billion or whatever. They do not make money off these fees (or that is not the purpose). It is an attempt to cultivate their garden of developers in that only the desired will continue, and the rest will wither and die.
Anyone know why he named it XBOX?
Because when you put your thumbs on a PlayStation controller, the right thumb covers buttons marked with an X and a square (that is, a box). Even 360 refers to a circle, which is also a PlayStation button.
It's probably legacy booting WIndows 8.
And truth be told, any modern PC capable of running Windows 8 has probably already shipped with UEFI in it. Yes, UEFI. Intel has not provided an old style BIOS with any chips since at least he Core 2 Duo era (they provided both at first, then phased out the BIOS since UEFI BIOS emulation legacy boot worked well enough). Ditto for the BIOS vendors. The BIOS setup program is typically just a UEFI configuration program nowadays, and it just jumps straight into the old legacy BIOS boot chain.
And yes, BIOS is a nasty hack nowadays. Just look at the contortions GRUB goes through in order to work - the various stage loaders that each chain load one another because the BIOS is too stupid to do it at once. On (U)EFI, it's just a 32-bit binary sitting on a FAT32 partition that the firmware loads directly and runs.
For one thing, everything has to be rewritten line-by-line in C#. For another, only ten countries can buy XNA games. Finally, a letter to MVPs implies that XNA is likely to go unsupported soon.
Cliff Notes: IMHO the article is wrongyou can move on now.
I think the article is good advice for future developments maybe, but the current state of the Xbox isn’t nearly as bad as what the author makes it out to be.
The boot time to game is solely dependent on how many splash screen individual developers put in their game. Otherwise from XBox logo to game load is like what 10 seconds? I personally don't think that's unreasonable.
As to advertisig...It's relevant and I don't think it's overly intrusive...Yet...I don't mind that one advertising tile in the bottom right of every other screen. It doesn't affect my experience one way or the other. When they make me start click through an ad to get to my game, I'm throwing the thing out to craig’s list or e-bay.
As to XBox Live...again, in the grand scheme of things I think 100 bucks a year (family account w/ 4 accounts) isn't ridiculous. The matchmaking / audio is a class above anything on PS3 or Wii (WiiU). I find it’s worth it for that alone. Also, if you’re thrifty throughout the year you can find subscriptions for cheap (30 bucks / yr per account). Compare that to any of the ‘free to play’ games or a WoW account and you’re immediately in the same price range for a year. Finally, if you don’t want to pay, get XBox silver. You don’t get online play, but you’ll get through all the single player games fine.
That would be a valid complaint if this were live.com, but this is slashdot.org and the reader is assumed to know how to use google and possibly even how to log into their router.
Come on, that wasn't even really true a decade ago - and modern Slashdot it's asinine to assume that even 50% of the readers here configure routers at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
MS has a pretty good range of media services available, in fact I'd be hard pressed to find anywhere as good
No, you wouldn't actually. AppleTV has all those features (including things like Netflix, Hulu, HBO) with no monthly fee paid to Apple to make use of those features.
That and the AppleTV also supports airplay for small device mirroring.
And it plays media directly from an iTunes account which many, many people have now...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Normally I think calls of posts being astroturf are way over-done on the internet, everyone uses that phrase anyone anyone simply says they like anything.
But I have to admit that post was waving more red flags than a Chinese military review...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
..I find that practically every single comment in this article applies to the PS3 as well.
Down to the bizarre warning that every game provides a custom icon for that means "saving, don't turn off". To add insult to injury, on the PS3 you have to click through a warning about the saving icon before starting every game, every single time.
I don't own an X-Box
OK. But that makes this next statement rather odd.
I love that I can control the Xbox now with a Windows Phone, using Smart Glass.
Why would you love that you can now control something that you don't even have?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I DON'T LIKE SPAM!!
... the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate. Could this guy possibly mix and otherwise abuse metaphors more?
Because I've used it at friends' homes who have an X-Box and a Windows Phone.
Can't I love something that I don't have?
-David
No, he's that brain surgeon guy :-)
Brain Surgeon - That Mitchell & Webb Look , Series 3 - BBC Two
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I
Actually BIOS compatibility is just another module that is loaded into UEFI. I don't recall the name of it, but it just emulates enough bios functions to get legacy hardware and software running. On proper UEFI implementations, you can disable it entirely so long as all of your hardware is fully UEFI aware and your OS supports UEFI boot. (My radeon 7850 isn't uefi aware, so I can't disable it on mine.)
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Perhaps it was my assumption that if you're not doing split-screen, you might as well game on a PC instead of an Xbox 360 console.
Yes. He is this guy.
i stand corrected
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Yeah mods, whatever, don't have time to even finish most games, let alone screw around with mods.
So how are budding developers supposed to get their start without mods?
thats great for the handful of games that have local multiplayer
This handful is larger on consoles than on PCs. There are entire local-multiplayer-centric genres that tend not to get ported to PC, such as party games and fighting games.
but unfortunately that feature has also been stripped
Every Call of Duty game that I've seen still supports split-screen on the Xbox 360. But you're right that I quit Animal Crossing when I discovered that despite the huge CPU power and resolution increase from the DS to Wii, City Folk didn't have split-screen.
Verizon's pop up ad won't go away over the text of this slashdot post, make it stop!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
I always thought the point of playing games like that with others was the bonding experience and which game you play, and on what system you play it, was kind of a secondary factor.
But you still have to get past the steps of 1. finding games to play and 2. setting up a system compatible with those games in the first place. The small selection of PC-compatible major-label local multiplayer games isn't quite compelling enough to get past step 1, let alone step 2.
It's not like I'm planning to lead a revolution in the gaming market, so I really only tend to focus on personal solutions.
I'm approaching this from the point of view of small video game developers. The article and other articles point out that the tools and approval fees to port even a completed Windows game to Xbox 360 can cost tens of thousands of dollars per year. A lot of small developers can't afford this entry barrier.
And if the head of household is unwilling to buy an Xbox, there's no gaming at all, so what's your point?
My point is that far more gamers are willing to buy an Xbox 360 and connect it to a TV than to buy a PC and connect it to a TV.
If you can point to anywhere where I claimed this was a free of cost solution
The presumed free of cost solution, from the gamer's side (not the developer's side), is to use the console that one presumably already bought sometime in the past seven years. But as the article points out, the console makers make it cost-prohibitive for a small developer to gain access to those gamers who already bought a console.
Ouya would be ideal provided it catches on. Previous open systems, such as GP32, GP2X, GP2X Wiz, and Pandora, all failed to become popular in North America.
my PC is connected to my TV. I did it because I already had the PC and the TV and wanted a DVR that [obeys me]
So when you want to use the PC connected to the TV for web surfing or word processing or something similar, where do you put the mouse and keyboard when you use the PC connected to the TV? And how does the gaming or other use affect the DVR functionality?