This is my beef: you're talking about blatant, illegal (duh) piracy of games and movies.
We're not condoning it, we're predicting how the consumer technology and content landscape is going to change over the next couple of years. We're also trying to guess what Microsoft's long-term strategy is because it sure as Hell isn't what they say it is.
People break laws, all sorts of laws, all over the world, throughout the ages. Sometimes that's a bad thing, sometimes it's a good thing. But predicting the future based on the assumption that people will stick to the rules is not a good idea.
As previously discussed? You link to a comment to a mildly related story from a few weeks ago, and try to pass that off as a story. However, it's not just any old comment; it's one you made yourself!
I understand you concerns but, overall, I have to disagree. The reason that I wrote the original comment was because no professional journalistic source had spotted the trend I wanted to discuss. If they had I would have saved myself a lot of time and trouble and simply linked to them. Now that one of the most important elements of that prediction has come into being, I thought it was important to submit the Zdnet story along with the context provided by my original comment. I'm sure that the/. submissions editors have their own reservations about featuring comments but in this case they agreed with me that the context was necessary.
Another thing to remember is that the thoughts coming out of our heads are no less valid than
the thoughts produced by professional pundits. In fact, they get most of there content by trawling through highly-rated comments on/. and other forums. They generally work to tight deadlines and often don't have a very deep understanding of the issues. I've often seen my original thoughts reproduced in articles a few days later, sometimes with laughable mistakes or misinterpretations included. But this is all part of how information and ideas flow through our culture.
I would urge anyone who want to add to the quality of the discussions here to link freely both to journalistic sources and the comments of your peers here and on other forums.
This comment in a discussion last month pointed to Microsoft's apparently unnoticed but reasonably obvious larger scale ambitions and suggest that they will be willing to spend a great deal more on winning this fight than Sony and Nintendo not because they have more money but because they are playing for far higher stakes.
The most important thing to realize is that their primary objective is to establish the Xbox as a sort of hardware (and therefore competition-free) incarnation of MSN Messenger, positioning it as a communications device with a far, far more mainstream audience than just gamers. This is the motivation behind their massive global investment in Cable companies and their apparently insane over-investment in hosting capability.
Modding will hurt game sales, no doubt about it, but it will, especially with this new Divx capability, greatly accelerate the machines market penetration. MS are secretly delighted to exchange their short-term earnings on content to further their progress towards becoming the world's chat-room / paid dating service / whatever else comes with total control of the largest network on the planet (and don't forget that a $199 price will get them into a lot more homes that even the cheapest Dell machine - think India, think China).
The person who submited the article is seriously overestimating the importance of this.
Um... that would be me. I don't generally have a tendency for hype but, in this case, all the pieces that are needed to make Xbox a powerful proposition are falling into place. It's important to stress that I'm not pro or anti MS, I'm just trying to predict how things will be in about a year or so.
People without computers don't hack their x-boxen. Trust me on this one. I doubt anyone is going to go out and buy an x-box just because of this.
That's not how it will work. There's already a burgeoning community of people willing to either mod people's existing Xboxes or sell pre-modded machines. The wholesale prices of these chips appear to go as low as $30 and they are becoming increasing easy to fit, with 12 wires options now replacing the original 29 wire options.
I would suggest that it will become quite common for people to offer modding for about $90 dollars or pre-modded machines for about $270. In somes cases the prices will be even lower than this as budding entrepaneurs, just like MS themselves, will subsidize the initial costs in the interests of developing a substantial customer-base in their own community to whom they can sell films and games on an ongoing basis.
In terms of both skill and capital, the bars to entry are extremely low and I expect that everyone will soon have a "friend-of-a-friend" who will offer these services.
For year I've been under the impression that LCD screens simply don't cut it for serious gaming and that most hardcore FPS players still rely on their trusty CRTs. I gather that the problem was primarily one of there being a slightly slower reaction time and lower refresh rates.
Possibly there have been advances in this area that I haven't heard about; anyone know what the current wisdom is on this?
And is it realistic for us to be talking about serious gamers switching over to laptops if this vital component is not yet up to par?
Tom's Hardware is currently running a feature entitled How To Select The Right Case For Your Computer which takes modding potential into consideration, even suggesting the Directron/Super Flower - 201S as a sort of "pre-modded" option for those of us too busy playing games or just too plain lazy to put in the necessary work ourselves.
What I really need is a case big enough to fit Tom inside it so that he can continually keep my machine up-to-date without my needing to waste so much time reading all these hardware websites.
At the very least, he'd probably be quieter than my fan.
So far, as I understand it, this 22nd known amino acid has only been found in methanogens although the article states that:
Krzycki believes it is likely to be found in other situations - in other organisms
Those other organisms have yet to be identified and almost certainly don't include humans. That suggests that this discovery won't have much bearing on diseases that affect humans, unless it's an important factor in the make-up of one of our parasites.
The very fact that this amino acid was overlooked for so long suggests that it's direct importance to our lives is negligible; it's relevance is more about filling the final gaps in an overall picture.
In the article, Krzycki suggests that it also alters the way we should approach genetics:
"This shows us that the genetic code, and therefore, evolution is much more plastic than people might have thought."
"I think this work will cause researchers to start looking at genetic sequences that they might have thought at first were simply aberrations," he said. "Instead, they might signal discoveries like ours."
If connecting video and sound cables is too messy, how do you intend to handle the 29 solder points for the X-box mod chip?
As you'd expect, a vast army of techie hustlers, with varying degrees of ability but all sharing a rapt interest in easy money, will emerge, wraith-like, to meet the demand. In most cases these same kids will hope to continue pocketing a nice profit far into the future by selling the same customers a variety of pirated music and movies. Perhaps they'll even take a leaf out of Microsoft's book and sell the mod-chip at a discount today to reap extra profits tomorrow.
Only if people decide that it's cheaper to spend $200 on an X-box, $60 on a mod chip, $25 on soldering equipment, $500 on a computer with a CD-R drive, and $50/mo on a cable modem connection than it is to spend $4.25 to rent a DVD for 5 days at Blockbuster,
You're missing the point. The kid selling the modding service and the pirated movies and games will need the $25 soldering equipment, the broadband connection and the $500 computer (which, presumably, most tech-inclined kids already have).
All the customer needs is their $200 Xbox, a TV and $2 dollars to buy a film or a game.
...all while putting up with the fact that DivX quality is noticeably worse than DVD.
Actually, it can be a lot better than you'd imagine, depending largely on the source material; if someone has gone into a cinema and videoed it straight off the screen, well, obviously the quality is going to be crap. Equally, if someone has compressed a film down to 500mb to facilitate faster down and uploading, that's going to suck. If, however, the film has been ripped straight from DVD and sized to the very limits of a 700mb CDR, the quality can be absolutely great, far superior to VHS. I'm quite fussy and would never desecrate my favorite films by watching sub-par copies of them, so it says a lot than I'm perfectly happy to watch a downloaded Divx of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Tiger, one of my favorite films of all time.
Me? I've got the computer, the soldering equipment, and the cable modem connection, and I still think it makes more sense to rent DVDs.
Sure, and that's your choice. Many people, mostly the same people who can afford to buy a lot of albums, movies and games today, will, like yourself, opt for the convenience of continuing to do so. The real benefit will be to younger and less well-off people who don't have that kind spare cash; they'll now be able to enjoy as much of the culture as they want, at no real loss to the producers.
Although I took the opportunity to laugh at the media industry grease-balls, I expect that, as with MP3, the overall result will almost certainly be more profits as the Warez kiddies mature, get proper incomes and feed their pop culture appetite from official, licensed sources.
Nope, pot isn't legal... but we got a very special word for it... it is 'gedoogd'.
Look... you can call it anything you want but the fact is that I (or, indeed, any Dutch policeman) can walk down the road, walk into one of many cafes, browse a long menu detailingdozens of varieties of grass and weed, hand over a few Euros and, in return, be handed a bag of white Widow.
Seriously, how is that not legal? I do understand what you mean (ie. that it's technically decriminilized rather than legalized) but let's be honest about the reality of the situation: Nobody is ever going to be arrested for buying or selling pot in the Netherlands.
Thankfully, it looks as if the same common sense will soon be applied in the UK too.
(Mods, I've effectively modded myself down -1, off-topic by not applying my +1 bonus)
The guy asking these questions, Erik Meijer MEP, probably realized the game was up when the Parliament issued it's preliminary answers in only one format... Microsoft Word.
2. Is the Commission also aware that failure to register with.NET Passport results in exclusion from many sites' services, that unsubscribing is not possible, that periodically only out-of-date information is removed and that the passwords to be given (minimum of six characters only) are easily accessible, to some extent, to others posing as system administrators or possessing considerable knowledge of dictionaries?
You realize, of course, that pot is legal in the Netherlands?
So lets see...more more lost, and fewer games bought (because you can copy them now), and you think Microsoft is going to be HAPPY?!
Well.. yeah!
I realize it sounds strange but Microsoft's absolute priority in all of this is to get as many people as possible hooked up to both broadband and Xboxes, all ready and lined up for their far larger-scale ambitions.
They'll do anything they can to drive the take-up of broadband, in particular cable, and if it takes a temporary explosion of piracy to facilitate that, they won't be too worried.
If you think about it, Windows acceptance as a universal platform and, thus, the source of their current power, is in large part due to the fact that, for many years it was incredibly simple to get your hands on a pirate copy.
Of course, they'll never say that but anyone who understands how markets are seeded understands the logic behind what happened.
What they understand is that here they are again, right at the beginning of something big, and in order for it to happen at all, they've got to making signing up to both broadband and the MS way so compelling, such a no-brainer that the up-till-now reluctant masses will fall into line.
It takes years for any real market to become profitable. MS know that. They also know that this is going to be bigger then anything they've thus far imagined and they're determined to keep their hands on the reigns, almost irregardless of short-term cost.
The appearance of Divx as an unofficial but nonetheless killer Xbox App is going to make it particularly attractive to broadband Internet consumers, a demographic that MS is already betting heavily on.
Obviously, the ability to download films in a few hours, burn them using a regular CDR (as opposed to an expensive DVD-R) and go play them in a more comfortable environment is going to be pretty attractive to people who are already paying for broadband. No doubt, it will also attract a tremendous number of subscribers to broadband.
This, in turn, will benefit the introduction of the Xbox's extended functionality that MS is anxious to keep under wraps for now but that is far, far more important to them than games or protecting content owned by the film studios.
Hell.. you can play DivX titles on your $50 Dreamcast...
...but you can't go up to full DVD resolution and I think that the bit rate is limited to 700kbs
Yeah, I'd heard about that. As I see it, unless you achieve something that fills the screen and is as good as DVD to all but the most discerning eye, the whole exercise is just hacking for the sake of hacking.
I presume (and hope!) that the inability to render Divx at a high, full screen resolution is largely down to the Dreamcast's lesser computational abilities whereas, once they've found a way to hack it, the Xbox will have more than enough firepower.
Um.. I'm going to break the rules a bit and post a reply to my own, previous posting because I've found some more info.
The following was on XboxMods.co.uk, a well-respected site:
After chatting with the Enigmah coder - he tells me they are at an advance stage with a DiVX player addon !! sounds like fun:)
Bottom line - homebrew is gonna rule the XBOX !
It's not clear as to whether that add-on will be hardware or a software upgrade (is anyone out there in a position to take an educated guess?) but, either way, it looks as if the Divx explosion is coming soon to an Xbox near you.
"Alright, damn you!" hissed a clearly exasperated Pedersen "I admit that I've been toying around but it's for a good cause and, after all, no harm's been done!"
Slashdot Mirror
This is my beef: you're talking about blatant, illegal (duh) piracy of games and movies.
We're not condoning it, we're predicting how the consumer technology and content landscape is going to change over the next couple of years. We're also trying to guess what Microsoft's long-term strategy is because it sure as Hell isn't what they say it is.
People break laws, all sorts of laws, all over the world, throughout the ages. Sometimes that's a bad thing, sometimes it's a good thing. But predicting the future based on the assumption that people will stick to the rules is not a good idea.
As previously discussed? You link to a comment to a mildly related story from a few weeks ago, and try to pass that off as a story. However, it's not just any old comment; it's one you made yourself!
I understand you concerns but, overall, I have to disagree. The reason that I wrote the original comment was because no professional journalistic source had spotted the trend I wanted to discuss. If they had I would have saved myself a lot of time and trouble and simply linked to them. Now that one of the most important elements of that prediction has come into being, I thought it was important to submit the Zdnet story along with the context provided by my original comment. I'm sure that the /. submissions editors have their own reservations about featuring comments but in this case they agreed with me that the context was necessary.
Another thing to remember is that the thoughts coming out of our heads are no less valid than the thoughts produced by professional pundits. In fact, they get most of there content by trawling through highly-rated comments on /. and other forums. They generally work to tight deadlines and often don't have a very deep understanding of the issues. I've often seen my original thoughts reproduced in articles a few days later, sometimes with laughable mistakes or misinterpretations included. But this is all part of how information and ideas flow through our culture.
I would urge anyone who want to add to the quality of the discussions here to link freely both to journalistic sources and the comments of your peers here and on other forums.
And, it's written 'DivX'. Ha! I just linked to myself! I'm so cool!
That's exactly want I mean, you just added to the quality of the discussion by linking to yourself.
This comment in a discussion last month pointed to Microsoft's apparently unnoticed but reasonably obvious larger scale ambitions and suggest that they will be willing to spend a great deal more on winning this fight than Sony and Nintendo not because they have more money but because they are playing for far higher stakes.
The most important thing to realize is that their primary objective is to establish the Xbox as a sort of hardware (and therefore competition-free) incarnation of MSN Messenger, positioning it as a communications device with a far, far more mainstream audience than just gamers. This is the motivation behind their massive global investment in Cable companies and their apparently insane over-investment in hosting capability.
Modding will hurt game sales, no doubt about it, but it will, especially with this new Divx capability, greatly accelerate the machines market penetration. MS are secretly delighted to exchange their short-term earnings on content to further their progress towards becoming the world's chat-room / paid dating service / whatever else comes with total control of the largest network on the planet (and don't forget that a $199 price will get them into a lot more homes that even the cheapest Dell machine - think India, think China).
The person who submited the article is seriously overestimating the importance of this.
Um... that would be me. I don't generally have a tendency for hype but, in this case, all the pieces that are needed to make Xbox a powerful proposition are falling into place. It's important to stress that I'm not pro or anti MS, I'm just trying to predict how things will be in about a year or so.
People without computers don't hack their x-boxen. Trust me on this one. I doubt anyone is going to go out and buy an x-box just because of this.
That's not how it will work. There's already a burgeoning community of people willing to either mod people's existing Xboxes or sell pre-modded machines. The wholesale prices of these chips appear to go as low as $30 and they are becoming increasing easy to fit, with 12 wires options now replacing the original 29 wire options.
I would suggest that it will become quite common for people to offer modding for about $90 dollars or pre-modded machines for about $270. In somes cases the prices will be even lower than this as budding entrepaneurs, just like MS themselves, will subsidize the initial costs in the interests of developing a substantial customer-base in their own community to whom they can sell films and games on an ongoing basis.
In terms of both skill and capital, the bars to entry are extremely low and I expect that everyone will soon have a "friend-of-a-friend" who will offer these services.
For year I've been under the impression that LCD screens simply don't cut it for serious gaming and that most hardcore FPS players still rely on their trusty CRTs. I gather that the problem was primarily one of there being a slightly slower reaction time and lower refresh rates.
Possibly there have been advances in this area that I haven't heard about; anyone know what the current wisdom is on this?
And is it realistic for us to be talking about serious gamers switching over to laptops if this vital component is not yet up to par?
1. IBM wanted to get out ahead of the curve they saw as becoming an important force in the industry. Too late for MS to do that.
Funny, that's what they said about MS and the Internet.
From the course intro page:
The only requirement for the project is that it be "extremely cool"
This is the sort of academic requirement I can live with!
Tom's Hardware is currently running a feature entitled How To Select The Right Case For Your Computer which takes modding potential into consideration, even suggesting the Directron/Super Flower - 201S as a sort of "pre-modded" option for those of us too busy playing games or just too plain lazy to put in the necessary work ourselves.
So, what would be the cyrillic for Slashdot.org?
What I really need is a case big enough to fit Tom inside it so that he can continually keep my machine up-to-date without my needing to waste so much time reading all these hardware websites.
At the very least, he'd probably be quieter than my fan.
So, would owning the net mean that my ISP would be obliged to give me some sort of discount on what I'm paying them every month?
Perhaps these new aminos hold clues to diseases.
So far, as I understand it, this 22nd known amino acid has only been found in methanogens although the article states that:
Krzycki believes it is likely to be found in other situations - in other organisms
Those other organisms have yet to be identified and almost certainly don't include humans. That suggests that this discovery won't have much bearing on diseases that affect humans, unless it's an important factor in the make-up of one of our parasites.
The very fact that this amino acid was overlooked for so long suggests that it's direct importance to our lives is negligible; it's relevance is more about filling the final gaps in an overall picture.
In the article, Krzycki suggests that it also alters the way we should approach genetics:
"This shows us that the genetic code, and therefore, evolution is much more plastic than people might have thought."
"I think this work will cause researchers to start looking at genetic sequences that they might have thought at first were simply aberrations," he said. "Instead, they might signal discoveries like ours."
so what ? what is wrong with that?
Nothing whatsoever!
I enjoy the taste of freedom every time I visit The Netherlands ;)
If connecting video and sound cables is too messy, how do you intend to handle the 29 solder points for the X-box mod chip?
As you'd expect, a vast army of techie hustlers, with varying degrees of ability but all sharing a rapt interest in easy money, will emerge, wraith-like, to meet the demand. In most cases these same kids will hope to continue pocketing a nice profit far into the future by selling the same customers a variety of pirated music and movies. Perhaps they'll even take a leaf out of Microsoft's book and sell the mod-chip at a discount today to reap extra profits tomorrow.
Only if people decide that it's cheaper to spend $200 on an X-box, $60 on a mod chip, $25 on soldering equipment, $500 on a computer with a CD-R drive, and $50/mo on a cable modem connection than it is to spend $4.25 to rent a DVD for 5 days at Blockbuster,
You're missing the point. The kid selling the modding service and the pirated movies and games will need the $25 soldering equipment, the broadband connection and the $500 computer (which, presumably, most tech-inclined kids already have).
All the customer needs is their $200 Xbox, a TV and $2 dollars to buy a film or a game.
Actually, it can be a lot better than you'd imagine, depending largely on the source material; if someone has gone into a cinema and videoed it straight off the screen, well, obviously the quality is going to be crap. Equally, if someone has compressed a film down to 500mb to facilitate faster down and uploading, that's going to suck. If, however, the film has been ripped straight from DVD and sized to the very limits of a 700mb CDR, the quality can be absolutely great, far superior to VHS. I'm quite fussy and would never desecrate my favorite films by watching sub-par copies of them, so it says a lot than I'm perfectly happy to watch a downloaded Divx of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Tiger, one of my favorite films of all time.
Me? I've got the computer, the soldering equipment, and the cable modem connection, and I still think it makes more sense to rent DVDs.
Sure, and that's your choice. Many people, mostly the same people who can afford to buy a lot of albums, movies and games today, will, like yourself, opt for the convenience of continuing to do so. The real benefit will be to younger and less well-off people who don't have that kind spare cash; they'll now be able to enjoy as much of the culture as they want, at no real loss to the producers.
Although I took the opportunity to laugh at the media industry grease-balls, I expect that, as with MP3, the overall result will almost certainly be more profits as the Warez kiddies mature, get proper incomes and feed their pop culture appetite from official, licensed sources.
Nope, pot isn't legal... but we got a very special word for it... it is 'gedoogd'.
Look... you can call it anything you want but the fact is that I (or, indeed, any Dutch policeman) can walk down the road, walk into one of many cafes, browse a long menu detailingdozens of varieties of grass and weed, hand over a few Euros and, in return, be handed a bag of white Widow.
Seriously, how is that not legal? I do understand what you mean (ie. that it's technically decriminilized rather than legalized) but let's be honest about the reality of the situation: Nobody is ever going to be arrested for buying or selling pot in the Netherlands.
Thankfully, it looks as if the same common sense will soon be applied in the UK too.
(Mods, I've effectively modded myself down -1, off-topic by not applying my +1 bonus)
They have the resources to release WordPerfect and OpenOffice copies.
But they didn't.
Bit like Dell having the resources to offer Linux as a pre-installed option on all their machines.
But they don't.
The guy asking these questions, Erik Meijer MEP, probably realized the game was up when the Parliament issued it's preliminary answers in only one format... Microsoft Word.
Given what Microsoft are trying to do to all of us, is the above posting really that far off-topic?
This, taken from the the original parliamentary submission upon which the Reg article is based, is laugh-out-load funny:
2. Is the Commission also aware that failure to register with .NET Passport results in exclusion from many sites' services, that unsubscribing is not possible, that periodically only out-of-date information is removed and that the passwords to be given (minimum of six characters only) are easily accessible, to some extent, to others posing as system administrators or possessing considerable knowledge of dictionaries?
You realize, of course, that pot is legal in the Netherlands?
So lets see...more more lost, and fewer games bought (because you can copy them now), and you think Microsoft is going to be HAPPY?!
Well.. yeah!
I realize it sounds strange but Microsoft's absolute priority in all of this is to get as many people as possible hooked up to both broadband and Xboxes, all ready and lined up for their far larger-scale ambitions.
They'll do anything they can to drive the take-up of broadband, in particular cable, and if it takes a temporary explosion of piracy to facilitate that, they won't be too worried.
If you think about it, Windows acceptance as a universal platform and, thus, the source of their current power, is in large part due to the fact that, for many years it was incredibly simple to get your hands on a pirate copy.
Of course, they'll never say that but anyone who understands how markets are seeded understands the logic behind what happened.
What they understand is that here they are again, right at the beginning of something big, and in order for it to happen at all, they've got to making signing up to both broadband and the MS way so compelling, such a no-brainer that the up-till-now reluctant masses will fall into line.
It takes years for any real market to become profitable. MS know that. They also know that this is going to be bigger then anything they've thus far imagined and they're determined to keep their hands on the reigns, almost irregardless of short-term cost.
The appearance of Divx as an unofficial but nonetheless killer Xbox App is going to make it particularly attractive to broadband Internet consumers, a demographic that MS is already betting heavily on.
Obviously, the ability to download films in a few hours, burn them using a regular CDR (as opposed to an expensive DVD-R) and go play them in a more comfortable environment is going to be pretty attractive to people who are already paying for broadband. No doubt, it will also attract a tremendous number of subscribers to broadband.
This, in turn, will benefit the introduction of the Xbox's extended functionality that MS is anxious to keep under wraps for now but that is far, far more important to them than games or protecting content owned by the film studios.
Hell.. you can play DivX titles on your $50 Dreamcast...
...but you can't go up to full DVD resolution and I think that the bit rate is limited to 700kbs
Yeah, I'd heard about that. As I see it, unless you achieve something that fills the screen and is as good as DVD to all but the most discerning eye, the whole exercise is just hacking for the sake of hacking.
I presume (and hope!) that the inability to render Divx at a high, full screen resolution is largely down to the Dreamcast's lesser computational abilities whereas, once they've found a way to hack it, the Xbox will have more than enough firepower.
Um.. I'm going to break the rules a bit and post a reply to my own, previous posting because I've found some more info.
The following was on XboxMods.co.uk, a well-respected site:
After chatting with the Enigmah coder - he tells me they are at an advance stage with a DiVX player addon !! sounds like fun :)
Bottom line - homebrew is gonna rule the XBOX !
It's not clear as to whether that add-on will be hardware or a software upgrade (is anyone out there in a position to take an educated guess?) but, either way, it looks as if the Divx explosion is coming soon to an Xbox near you.
"Alright, damn you!" hissed a clearly exasperated Pedersen "I admit that I've been toying around but it's for a good cause and, after all, no harm's been done!"
"We concur" giggled the 657 other Pedersens.