Two things here. First, this article wasn't about preventing spammers from using your SMTP server as a relay, but in slowing down the reception of mail at the end-point SMTP server. This will ripple up the chain to hurt the spammers by slowing down the relays they use. Second, it doesn't matter whether I get 10 spam emails or 10,000. One of the goals of TarProxy is to be ubiquitous. I may only receive 10 spammy emails, but my running instance of TarProxy will determine that those are of sufficient spamminess to throttle bandwidth to each of those connections. At the same time, you're doing the same on your SMTP server, and Joe over there is, and so is Susie, and so on. If everybody (defined as "a large number of smtp servers", and not necessarily "everybody") is running such a service, the spammers will be hurt. You're right that a single individual using this won't make much difference, but that didn't seem to be the goal of the article.
This surprises you? The written English language has suffered horribly. Reading what most people write, you'd be hard pressed to call them "literate". For example, look at the prolific use of "would of", "could of", "should of" in place of the contraction form "would've", "could've", "should've". People pronounce those improperly (should be "wood-ev" with a very short 'e' sound, and not "wood-uhv") and consequently write them as they hear them.
Then there's the ever present "lose" v. "loose" and "chose" v. "choose" misspellings, the misusage of "their", "there", and "they're", "to", "too", and "two", and so on. Sadly, these mistakes are even made by native English speakers. It would be excusable for people speaking/writing English as a second or third language (hey, I had three years of Spanish, and I still butcher the language when I try to speak it; forget about writing it).
I blame Hooked on Phonics for teaching our children to spell how things sound, and not how things are spelled.
and fucking hit the turbo boost asap to get into the canals
Silly, you don't get the turbo boost until later in the game. I can understand the parent's frustration with that boss, as it was pretty difficult when you have to hit more than one or two mirrors -- by the time you get to the last one, the first has usually dropped already so you have to start all over. The trick is to use missiles or charged blasts to quickly hit up the mirrors, and use your targetting to hit them from farther away. If you're quick enough on the later tasks (3 and 4 mirrors), it's not too bad, but it took me 10-15 tries. Most of that was due to Metroid Prime's poor controller interface, though.
They say specifically that the artifacts are in danger from the war, not the civilization.
If we didn't blow 'em up last time, what makes you think we'll blow 'em up this time? Also, lots of European historical monuments and artifacts were destroyed during WW2, and yes it was a shame, but do you suggest that WW2 shouldn't have been fought to save those? I suppose we'd all be speaking German right now if we didn't.
Sometimes, you've got to destroy things. Yes, it sucks, but given the choice between preserving the past and insuring the future, I'll take the latter. (and besides, if this "battery" was found in 1938, we've already had 65 years to study it.)
Does it really make a difference if you get an extra 2 frames per second on your game? I understand if you're doing super high end visualization where it's necessary, but at that point you can afford to purchase 5 different $500 cards and compare for yourself, right?
Yes, it does matter (within reason, anyway). While your current card may do well enough at Quake 3 and the new cards may not have a huge margin over it (really, what's the difference between 150fps and 200fps except in the very rare situation where absolutely everything on the screen is blowing up or something), that's old technology. As hardware capabilities increase, software complexity also increases. That card getting you 150fps at 1024x768 in Q3 with 4x FSAA will likely barely break 30fps for Doom 3. (at that point, you tweak -- drop your resolution, turn off FSAA and anisotropic filtering, lower your detail levels, turn off unnecessary effects, etc and get up to a playable 50fps or so) The cards doing 200fps in Q3 will probably run D3 around 50-60fps. While there's little difference between 150-200fps, there's a world of difference between 30 and 60fps.
And just to head off any, "But your eye can only see 24/30/60fps anyway, who needs more?" arguments:
Wrong
Film and television are watchable at such a low frame rate because film captures motion blur. Video games do not. Without motion blur, your brain needs more frames to make a smooth image. And even with motion blur, film is hardly smooth (watch a long horizontal pan some time, they can be painfully jerky depending on the speed of the pan).
These numbers are averages (except when you cheat and report the peak number instead, which will be even worse). Just because you normally get a smooth 60fps doesn't mean there won't be places where you drop to a slideshow 10fps. Higher is better when talking about averages, so that the worst case won't be so bad.
I'm not sure what the technical feasibility of this would be. Did you mean this as a practical solution, or was it a rhetorical hypothesis?
Hypothesis. If someone could design and create such a chip (and no, I don't know if it's possible), then I would expect Microsoft to leave them alone. Whether it's possible, and whether Microsoft would leave it alone, however, are up in the air. It might be a good route to try for those interested in modifying their XBox without getting into the piracy gray area. At least it would make them look more legitimate, and make it harder to lump them in with the pirate crowd.
As I say, I normally only pay cursory attention to these things. But for some reason, I had it in my head that MS had tried to use the DMCA to ban mod chips. Did this really happen, or have I just taken one too many knocks on the head?
Yes, Microsoft did threaten legal action against Lik-Sang, a major seller of mod chips and modified XBoxes. However, the main reason for the legal action is that the mod chips have as a primary use the ability to play illegal copies of games. If a mod chip were developed and proven to only allow installing linux, or playing imported (but not copied) games, and could not possibly play a copied game, I don't think Microsoft would care. Intent, as proven in the VCR case(s) (shit, if I could remember the cases refs...), is a major part of this. With VCRs, though they could be used to copy cassettes, it was shown that the main purpose was for time shifting "free" programming (ie, TV shows), and not for stealing movies. Because time shift falls under fair use protection, there was no issue. I could see the same precedent applying to mod chips -- so long as the mod chip is used to allow you to use your XBox within fair use provisions, you should be safe. If a mod chip is designed primarily for piracy, there's a copyright issue.
I'm saying that this is a necessary overture. We're giving MS the opportunity to give us a license. If they don't, then we can justify whatever's necessary to get it working.
I agree. I was trying to say that the tone and dilligence of the open letter doesn't seem sufficient. There's a big difference between (bad analogy warning!) filing for a building permit with a letter that basically says, "Let me build on my land, or you're a big meany and we're going to find a way to do it anyway," vs. filing for a building permit with all of your plans and paper work in order, contractors lined up and ready to go, and basically having shown due dilligence on your part to comply with zoning and building regulations. If you were refused in the latter case for some frivolous reason, you have a court case. If you are refused in the former, no attorney will do anything but laugh you out of his office.
I can understand the, "Because it's there," mentality, but sometimes there really doesn't seem to be a point. For example, I bought my XBox for gaming, and gaming only. If I wanted a $300 PC ($200 for the XBox, $100 miscellaneous fees for a keyboard and mouse and the necessary cables for splicing), I'd rather go out and buy a $300 PC. It's easier, and most likely better in the long run (I'll get a lager hard drive, a faster CPU, more memory, etc). That only leaves, "Let's screw Microsoft!" as a reason to run Linux on an XBox, and I don't find that sufficient.
Now, if the Linux/XBox guys find out that there's a technical limitation that keeps it from running well, or at all, then nobody should fault MS; as you say, it was never meant to be a general-purpose device. I don't gripe when the web server on my TiVo is sluggish. But we're not talking about a design limitation; we're talking about essentially a permissions issue.
Microsoft is not stopping anybody from modifying their XBox to run Linux, and if they did they wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on -- you bought the XBox, now you can do whatever you want to it. So long as you can prove you haven't stolen any software (ie, using your mod chip for piracy), you're in the clear. However, Microsoft doesn't have to make it easy for you to run Linux on their hardware by signing a boot loader for these guys. As well, Microsoft can exclude you from current and future XBox subscription services like XBox Live if you've modified your XBox, but that's your choice -- is running Linux on your XBox worth not being able to play games online? If so, then great. Run Linux.
There have been court cases (Sega v. Accolade, Atari v. Nintendo) that have set precedent on reverse engineering to avoid lock-out measures on video game consoles, and so long as the reverse engineering is done properly, there's no issue. True, those are pre-DMCA, but I'd wager that they still stand (court precedents, especially when there are multiple cases, tend to be stronger than new laws that have been less tried). However, none of those cases said that Sega or Nintendo were required to license Accolade's or Tengen's games, and the same applies here. If the Linux guys can reverse engineer Microsoft's protection method and circumvent it, then good for them, but Microsoft is not obligated to help them.
The PC game industry seems to have done pretty well given that it really demands at least a $600 "console" to play and only caters to people willing to purchase a $1,200 "console".
And if there aren't any good games, you can always use your PC for other things. Yes, there are the hardcore out there that buy their PCs for nothing but games. However, they're in the minority.
I don't think that this is a valid analogy. The microwave is not a general-purpose device that is only marketed for one purpose.
Neither is the XBox. It's a game machine, and not designed to be anything more. Otherwise, one could make just as much a case for the Gamecube. It's a PPC CPU and an ATI GPU (designed by ArtX, sure, but still...). Shouldn't we be trying to put OS X or LinuxPPC on that?
So perhaps there were more factors at stake in the 1984 video game crash than that Atari lacked absolute control over it's hardware.
Err... duh? I said, "A major contributing factor", not "The factor". Of course there were other issues, but it's undeniable that the ability to publish anything you wanted lead to many terrible games (*cough*Custer's Revenge*cough*), and that in turn lead to gamers getting burned and therefore being unwilling to purchase other games for fear of buying crap. Nintendo single-handedly turned this around with their NES, and a major point for the NES was that you needed to be certified by Nintendo if you wanted to publish for their system.
While the general PC gaming market may not have suffered a similar crash, there may be other reasons. Consider that a PC is a general purpose machine, and that you can use it for many other things besides gaming. Consoles, on the other hand, are not. When people won't buy games because they don't know what they're getting into, consoles have nothing to fall back on. PCs will still sell for other reasons, and so long as PCs still sell, people will still make games. And PC gaming has seen a number of slumps. For example, every time a new genre makes waves, like the FPS or the RTS, there are a huge number of terrible knock-offs. If that were to happen on a console, it would quickly die (because once you've played one, you've played them all, and there's nothing else to do with the console). For the PC, you can just wait it out for the next big thing, because your PC is still useful.
Considering that the XBox has a record-breaking 4.9 attach rate (that's games bought with an XBox), it's not as bad as you make it sound. And with XBox Live selling like hot cakes (Microsoft has sold 44% more of its XBox Live kits than Sony has of their network adaptor during their first three months in the market), attach rates are very likely to keep climbing and gamers will continue to buy games as well.
The modern computer game market lacks certification without suffering from this problem
The hell it doesn't. How many times have you bought a game, only to have to download a 100MB patch within a week? Or worse, not been able to play the game for a month or more while the developers hack out a patch that should've been in the game before it shipped? Certification processes help to minimize this, because your game has to hold up to testing to be approved for certification (no crashes, no major flaws or bugs, etc). Yes, it doesn't always work, but the number of buggy console games is infinitessimal compared to the number of buggy PC games, out of the box.
As well, there is a ton of crap games for the PC (take a look at the sub-$20 section of your favorite game store -- ignoring the few decent older titles that moved from $50 to $20, you're going to find a whole bunch of crap and the Serious Sam games). For most developers, selling 20,000 copies is considered good, and margins are very thin. There's no incentive to innovate or do something different, because it costs too much and the potential for failure is too high. If it were possible to have some sort of certification process for PC games, weeding out the terrible crap, profit margins would be better and more publishers would be willing to take a chance on innovative games.
I am not a lawyer either, but I don't think this is going to be good enough. For starters, just asking to be licensed doesn't seem sufficient to me, nor does it show due diligence in attempting to get licensed. Microsoft licenses game developers (publishers, actually, who then deal with the developers), and generally prefers established game publishers. That means that unless Linux can somehow be proven to be a video game, and unless an established publisher can be roped in (or get Mandrake or Redhat to become an "established game publisher" by taking a couple years and publishing many games), this really isn't going to stand up.
Then, if MS denies the sig, then we can start hacking the X-Box for compatibility purposes, 'cause it's no longer just an anti-privacy measure.
If a microwave is designed to cook food, but you want to hack it to play movies, are you hacking for "compatibility purposes"? Similarly, the XBox is a video game console. Its sole design and goal is to play video games. How, then, can hacking it to run linux be considered "compatibility"? Maybe it would if you're using linux as a basis for a game, in which case I bet Microsoft would happily license you (so long as you meet their criteria, and your game can hold up to strenuous testing which likely will include verifying that your game can't be used as a boot loader for a generic Linux OS or pirated games), but this open letter is about Linux as an OS.
How about we delare Linux as a video game. Then MS will have to sign it if we are willing to pay royalty which runs at $10.00 a piece. Then instead of selling it, just distribute it for free! I guess we might lend up paying some minimum royalty, but I don't think that would be too much higher than $100,000.
Nope. You still have a few other hurdles to jump, like being an "established game publisher" (the letter attempts to address this, but fails). And even then, Microsoft is not in any way obligated to let you publish for their platform. Assuming you could somehow fool Microsoft into agreeing not only that Linux is a video game (hard sell) but also that you're an established game publisher (even more difficult, unless you really are) and get them to agree to sign your code so you can publish, I don't think your royalty numbers will work out. Assuming $10 per copy (that's probably very high), and that the letter is correct in saying that Mandrake Linux for the XBox has been downloaded over 83,000 times, and that each one of those people downloads the newly signed version, that's $830,000 in royalty fees (who cares that you gave it away for free -- your royalty contract was per copy, and not per sold copy), or more than 8 times that $100,000 prize. How exactly do you plan on affording that?
You generally can decide who you sell something too, however you have no right to dictate what they do with it after they buy it.
Very true. You can buy an XBox, put in a mod chip, and run Linux until you get bored. However, Microsoft has no requirement or responsibility to sign your Linux distribution so that it will run on unmodified XBoxes. If others want to run your distribution, great -- they can modify their XBox as well. And if you want to get on XBox Live (a subscription service, wherein Microsoft can make stipulations such as requiring you to only use an unmodified XBox with XBox Live), tough crap. Buy another XBox, or get a mod chip that allows you to selectively turn it on or off (and then remember to always make sure it's off whenever you or anybody else tries to play on XBox Live, because the first time you hop online with that modchip active, you'll be blacklisted).
I read this open letter a couple days ago, and not only is it unlikely (understatement?) that Microsoft would take them seriously, the authors don't even really appear to care whether or not Microsoft agrees with them. The whole letter is interspersed with a number of jabs at Microsoft, which is not something that I would really consider wise if you want Microsoft to take you seriously. As well, they obviously don't understand the console video game market ("... Microsoft's deliberate design choices in terms of restricting the software that may run on an unmodified xbox...", "Xbox Linux gives choices back to the user which Microsoft denies them...", "In terms of our being an 'established game publisher' [19], members of our team have written games in the past, and our Xbox Linux distribution runs such fine games as 'Tux vs Clippy' [14], 'Tux Racer' [15], and 'Frozen Bubble' [16]," and so on). In a nutshell, they don't seem to understand that Microsoft has every right to restrict what software runs on their console (see Nintendo, Sony, Sega, et al). There's no "denial of choice" -- if you want a computer, don't buy an XBox. And writing a few amateur games does not give one the title of "established game publisher". Maybe "established game developer", in which case they could try getting into Microsoft's incubator program for developers with a good idea but no publisher, but that's not going to happen for the XBox Linux project.
Microsoft is responsible for making sure that only quality software (err... let's ignore stuff like Kabuki Warriors, eh? All consoles have to have their share of stinkers...) is released for their console. Otherwise, we'd be right back in 1984 and the last video game crash. A major contributing factor was Atari's lack of certification for games, and the subsequent glut of pure crap. Do we want to go back to that? I know I don't.
Finally, there are definitely piracy issues here. Right now, while it's not exactly difficult to modify an XBox, it's at least a small barrier of entry to the pirate underground. As well, it makes for a fantastic way to keep cheaters off of XBox Live. How simple would it be to write a small loader for copied games or cheats when you start from an open platform like Linux? If this gets certified (fat chance), the mod chip barrier to entry is no longer there, making it trivial to pirate games or cheat online. You can say what you will about piracy (piracy sucks, imho), but I think everybody will agree that online cheaters are teh suck.
I'm sure there are plentyofprojects out there that use Qt. Qt has been around for a very long time, and is quite mature. This isn't something that just sprang up overnight.
That depends on how libX is integrated into your project. Do you actively develop libX in your source tree, making changes to it and building it at the same time you build your product? If so, then you need to rebuilt it nightly (you can get cute, and look at changelists for your build and not rebuild some portions of your tree based on that, but it'll usually take about as long to determine that as it would to just build the thing).
However, if libX is developed by another team, you shouldn't be building the source code at all. Take drops of the library (and maybe that means you take source code drops and build the lib once yourself, or you take binary drops), and only when there are significant changes in libX that would benefit your product. That way, you're not rebuilding libX, and you're fairly well-protected against changes in libX (you only get a new libX if you need a bugfix or new feature).
Some call this the "viral" aspect of the GPL, but I daresay that those are the people who are only interested in taking from the community without giving something in return.
What was the last contribution you made to this nebulous "community"? Or are you only interested in "taking from the community" (running the software for free) without giving something in return? Pot, kettle, black, eh?
(and if in my ultimate wisdom I've chosen to pick on one of the few active open source developers also on Slashdot, my apologies -- however, the majority of people never have and never will contribute anything to "the community", myself included.)
Duh. However, my point was that I had not heard about these "extra" companies, and was wondering exactly what the AC meant. Thanks for the explanation.
They set up two companies, one for EA to publish Square titles in the US, and another for Square to publish EA titles in Japan.
That's what I would call a "publishing deal", as I said before. EA is still EA, and Square is still Square, so I don't get the "set up two companies" part.
I thought EA owned Square, or do they just publish Square's titles, or what?
EA and SquareSoft have a publishing deal, and that's all (that I know of -- EA very likely owns some stock in Square, but certainly not enough for a controlling interest). Sony owns a minority interest in the company, after bailing them out from the Final Fantasy Movie failure (sad, really, because the movie had much promise but didn't deliver). And now Enix and Square merged, with Enix likely to be the dominant side of the merger. However, this is a dupe in a way, though it would've better been noted as an item in Slashdback. "Hey, remember that article about Enix and Square merging? Well, they've done it!" Or something like that.
Re:BFD. You can do the same thing to the 10k CS
on
Unreal Security Hole
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You make good points, but I didn't want to associate Valve as a content creator, as they also did a lot of framework work in the Half-Life engine -- Half-Life is not simply Quake 1 with new graphics and possibly some gameplay additions (like Wheel of Time was to Unreal, or SiN was to Quake 2, or FAKK2 was to Quake 3, etc). In that vein, the Counter-Strike team is similar to (but lesser than) those development houses -- most everything is already there for them in the framework, they just supply some gameplay tweaks and new graphics, and stamp out a game. Lines blur, of course (where does American McGee's Alice fall in the Framework v. Content division? Or what about Deus Ex v. Unreal or Anachronox v. Quake 2?), but there seems to generally be two types of content providers -- those that don't need to highly modify the engine, and those that do. Counter-Strike, TF, WoT, FAKK2, etc (even Daikatana, which is pretty sad considering it took so long to release, yet didn't really add much to the genre) fall into the former category, imho. Half-Life, Deus Ex, Anachronox, Alice, etc fall into the latter.
Modifiable games are cool, because it gives people an entrance into the game development world. However, when game developers are hiring mod developers to create games, you end up with games that many times are little more than modifications (not that this is a bad thing, of course). There are exceptions (Steven Polge, now of Epic, for example -- wrote the first decent bot for Quake, the Reaper Bot, and now does most (all?) of the AI work for Epic's UT franchise; Zoid, of Quake 1 CTF fame and the linux ports of Quake 1/2, now works at Retro Studios, and helped create Metroid Prime; the TeamFortress guys that were hired by Valve to create the vaporware stand-alone TeamFortress 2, etc), but every rule has exceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
Two things here. First, this article wasn't about preventing spammers from using your SMTP server as a relay, but in slowing down the reception of mail at the end-point SMTP server. This will ripple up the chain to hurt the spammers by slowing down the relays they use. Second, it doesn't matter whether I get 10 spam emails or 10,000. One of the goals of TarProxy is to be ubiquitous. I may only receive 10 spammy emails, but my running instance of TarProxy will determine that those are of sufficient spamminess to throttle bandwidth to each of those connections. At the same time, you're doing the same on your SMTP server, and Joe over there is, and so is Susie, and so on. If everybody (defined as "a large number of smtp servers", and not necessarily "everybody") is running such a service, the spammers will be hurt. You're right that a single individual using this won't make much difference, but that didn't seem to be the goal of the article.
This surprises you? The written English language has suffered horribly. Reading what most people write, you'd be hard pressed to call them "literate". For example, look at the prolific use of "would of", "could of", "should of" in place of the contraction form "would've", "could've", "should've". People pronounce those improperly (should be "wood-ev" with a very short 'e' sound, and not "wood-uhv") and consequently write them as they hear them.
Then there's the ever present "lose" v. "loose" and "chose" v. "choose" misspellings, the misusage of "their", "there", and "they're", "to", "too", and "two", and so on. Sadly, these mistakes are even made by native English speakers. It would be excusable for people speaking/writing English as a second or third language (hey, I had three years of Spanish, and I still butcher the language when I try to speak it; forget about writing it).
I blame Hooked on Phonics for teaching our children to spell how things sound, and not how things are spelled.
Silly, you don't get the turbo boost until later in the game. I can understand the parent's frustration with that boss, as it was pretty difficult when you have to hit more than one or two mirrors -- by the time you get to the last one, the first has usually dropped already so you have to start all over. The trick is to use missiles or charged blasts to quickly hit up the mirrors, and use your targetting to hit them from farther away. If you're quick enough on the later tasks (3 and 4 mirrors), it's not too bad, but it took me 10-15 tries. Most of that was due to Metroid Prime's poor controller interface, though.
GTA2 works perfectly in Windows XP for me. Here's what I do:
That's it. Very simple.
Now, GTA1 was a DOS app IIRC, so you're likely to have more issues there (getting it to run will be easier than getting it to run with sound).
If we didn't blow 'em up last time, what makes you think we'll blow 'em up this time? Also, lots of European historical monuments and artifacts were destroyed during WW2, and yes it was a shame, but do you suggest that WW2 shouldn't have been fought to save those? I suppose we'd all be speaking German right now if we didn't.
Sometimes, you've got to destroy things. Yes, it sucks, but given the choice between preserving the past and insuring the future, I'll take the latter. (and besides, if this "battery" was found in 1938, we've already had 65 years to study it.)
Yes, it does matter (within reason, anyway). While your current card may do well enough at Quake 3 and the new cards may not have a huge margin over it (really, what's the difference between 150fps and 200fps except in the very rare situation where absolutely everything on the screen is blowing up or something), that's old technology. As hardware capabilities increase, software complexity also increases. That card getting you 150fps at 1024x768 in Q3 with 4x FSAA will likely barely break 30fps for Doom 3. (at that point, you tweak -- drop your resolution, turn off FSAA and anisotropic filtering, lower your detail levels, turn off unnecessary effects, etc and get up to a playable 50fps or so) The cards doing 200fps in Q3 will probably run D3 around 50-60fps. While there's little difference between 150-200fps, there's a world of difference between 30 and 60fps.
And just to head off any, "But your eye can only see 24/30/60fps anyway, who needs more?" arguments:
Hypothesis. If someone could design and create such a chip (and no, I don't know if it's possible), then I would expect Microsoft to leave them alone. Whether it's possible, and whether Microsoft would leave it alone, however, are up in the air. It might be a good route to try for those interested in modifying their XBox without getting into the piracy gray area. At least it would make them look more legitimate, and make it harder to lump them in with the pirate crowd.
Yes, Microsoft did threaten legal action against Lik-Sang, a major seller of mod chips and modified XBoxes. However, the main reason for the legal action is that the mod chips have as a primary use the ability to play illegal copies of games. If a mod chip were developed and proven to only allow installing linux, or playing imported (but not copied) games, and could not possibly play a copied game, I don't think Microsoft would care. Intent, as proven in the VCR case(s) (shit, if I could remember the cases refs ...), is a major part of this. With VCRs, though they could be used to copy cassettes, it was shown that the main purpose was for time shifting "free" programming (ie, TV shows), and not for stealing movies. Because time shift falls under fair use protection, there was no issue. I could see the same precedent applying to mod chips -- so long as the mod chip is used to allow you to use your XBox within fair use provisions, you should be safe. If a mod chip is designed primarily for piracy, there's a copyright issue.
I agree. I was trying to say that the tone and dilligence of the open letter doesn't seem sufficient. There's a big difference between (bad analogy warning!) filing for a building permit with a letter that basically says, "Let me build on my land, or you're a big meany and we're going to find a way to do it anyway," vs. filing for a building permit with all of your plans and paper work in order, contractors lined up and ready to go, and basically having shown due dilligence on your part to comply with zoning and building regulations. If you were refused in the latter case for some frivolous reason, you have a court case. If you are refused in the former, no attorney will do anything but laugh you out of his office.
I can understand the, "Because it's there," mentality, but sometimes there really doesn't seem to be a point. For example, I bought my XBox for gaming, and gaming only. If I wanted a $300 PC ($200 for the XBox, $100 miscellaneous fees for a keyboard and mouse and the necessary cables for splicing), I'd rather go out and buy a $300 PC. It's easier, and most likely better in the long run (I'll get a lager hard drive, a faster CPU, more memory, etc). That only leaves, "Let's screw Microsoft!" as a reason to run Linux on an XBox, and I don't find that sufficient.
Microsoft is not stopping anybody from modifying their XBox to run Linux, and if they did they wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on -- you bought the XBox, now you can do whatever you want to it. So long as you can prove you haven't stolen any software (ie, using your mod chip for piracy), you're in the clear. However, Microsoft doesn't have to make it easy for you to run Linux on their hardware by signing a boot loader for these guys. As well, Microsoft can exclude you from current and future XBox subscription services like XBox Live if you've modified your XBox, but that's your choice -- is running Linux on your XBox worth not being able to play games online? If so, then great. Run Linux.
There have been court cases (Sega v. Accolade, Atari v. Nintendo) that have set precedent on reverse engineering to avoid lock-out measures on video game consoles, and so long as the reverse engineering is done properly, there's no issue. True, those are pre-DMCA, but I'd wager that they still stand (court precedents, especially when there are multiple cases, tend to be stronger than new laws that have been less tried). However, none of those cases said that Sega or Nintendo were required to license Accolade's or Tengen's games, and the same applies here. If the Linux guys can reverse engineer Microsoft's protection method and circumvent it, then good for them, but Microsoft is not obligated to help them.
And if there aren't any good games, you can always use your PC for other things. Yes, there are the hardcore out there that buy their PCs for nothing but games. However, they're in the minority.
Neither is the XBox. It's a game machine, and not designed to be anything more. Otherwise, one could make just as much a case for the Gamecube. It's a PPC CPU and an ATI GPU (designed by ArtX, sure, but still ...). Shouldn't we be trying to put OS X or LinuxPPC on that?
Err ... duh? I said, "A major contributing factor", not "The factor". Of course there were other issues, but it's undeniable that the ability to publish anything you wanted lead to many terrible games (*cough*Custer's Revenge*cough*), and that in turn lead to gamers getting burned and therefore being unwilling to purchase other games for fear of buying crap. Nintendo single-handedly turned this around with their NES, and a major point for the NES was that you needed to be certified by Nintendo if you wanted to publish for their system.
While the general PC gaming market may not have suffered a similar crash, there may be other reasons. Consider that a PC is a general purpose machine, and that you can use it for many other things besides gaming. Consoles, on the other hand, are not. When people won't buy games because they don't know what they're getting into, consoles have nothing to fall back on. PCs will still sell for other reasons, and so long as PCs still sell, people will still make games. And PC gaming has seen a number of slumps. For example, every time a new genre makes waves, like the FPS or the RTS, there are a huge number of terrible knock-offs. If that were to happen on a console, it would quickly die (because once you've played one, you've played them all, and there's nothing else to do with the console). For the PC, you can just wait it out for the next big thing, because your PC is still useful.
Considering that the XBox has a record-breaking 4.9 attach rate (that's games bought with an XBox), it's not as bad as you make it sound. And with XBox Live selling like hot cakes (Microsoft has sold 44% more of its XBox Live kits than Sony has of their network adaptor during their first three months in the market), attach rates are very likely to keep climbing and gamers will continue to buy games as well.
The hell it doesn't. How many times have you bought a game, only to have to download a 100MB patch within a week? Or worse, not been able to play the game for a month or more while the developers hack out a patch that should've been in the game before it shipped? Certification processes help to minimize this, because your game has to hold up to testing to be approved for certification (no crashes, no major flaws or bugs, etc). Yes, it doesn't always work, but the number of buggy console games is infinitessimal compared to the number of buggy PC games, out of the box.
As well, there is a ton of crap games for the PC (take a look at the sub-$20 section of your favorite game store -- ignoring the few decent older titles that moved from $50 to $20, you're going to find a whole bunch of crap and the Serious Sam games). For most developers, selling 20,000 copies is considered good, and margins are very thin. There's no incentive to innovate or do something different, because it costs too much and the potential for failure is too high. If it were possible to have some sort of certification process for PC games, weeding out the terrible crap, profit margins would be better and more publishers would be willing to take a chance on innovative games.
I am not a lawyer either, but I don't think this is going to be good enough. For starters, just asking to be licensed doesn't seem sufficient to me, nor does it show due diligence in attempting to get licensed. Microsoft licenses game developers (publishers, actually, who then deal with the developers), and generally prefers established game publishers. That means that unless Linux can somehow be proven to be a video game, and unless an established publisher can be roped in (or get Mandrake or Redhat to become an "established game publisher" by taking a couple years and publishing many games), this really isn't going to stand up.
If a microwave is designed to cook food, but you want to hack it to play movies, are you hacking for "compatibility purposes"? Similarly, the XBox is a video game console. Its sole design and goal is to play video games. How, then, can hacking it to run linux be considered "compatibility"? Maybe it would if you're using linux as a basis for a game, in which case I bet Microsoft would happily license you (so long as you meet their criteria, and your game can hold up to strenuous testing which likely will include verifying that your game can't be used as a boot loader for a generic Linux OS or pirated games), but this open letter is about Linux as an OS.
Nope. You still have a few other hurdles to jump, like being an "established game publisher" (the letter attempts to address this, but fails). And even then, Microsoft is not in any way obligated to let you publish for their platform. Assuming you could somehow fool Microsoft into agreeing not only that Linux is a video game (hard sell) but also that you're an established game publisher (even more difficult, unless you really are) and get them to agree to sign your code so you can publish, I don't think your royalty numbers will work out. Assuming $10 per copy (that's probably very high), and that the letter is correct in saying that Mandrake Linux for the XBox has been downloaded over 83,000 times, and that each one of those people downloads the newly signed version, that's $830,000 in royalty fees (who cares that you gave it away for free -- your royalty contract was per copy, and not per sold copy), or more than 8 times that $100,000 prize. How exactly do you plan on affording that?
Very true. You can buy an XBox, put in a mod chip, and run Linux until you get bored. However, Microsoft has no requirement or responsibility to sign your Linux distribution so that it will run on unmodified XBoxes. If others want to run your distribution, great -- they can modify their XBox as well. And if you want to get on XBox Live (a subscription service, wherein Microsoft can make stipulations such as requiring you to only use an unmodified XBox with XBox Live), tough crap. Buy another XBox, or get a mod chip that allows you to selectively turn it on or off (and then remember to always make sure it's off whenever you or anybody else tries to play on XBox Live, because the first time you hop online with that modchip active, you'll be blacklisted).
I read this open letter a couple days ago, and not only is it unlikely (understatement?) that Microsoft would take them seriously, the authors don't even really appear to care whether or not Microsoft agrees with them. The whole letter is interspersed with a number of jabs at Microsoft, which is not something that I would really consider wise if you want Microsoft to take you seriously. As well, they obviously don't understand the console video game market ("... Microsoft's deliberate design choices in terms of restricting the software that may run on an unmodified xbox ...", "Xbox Linux gives choices back to the user which Microsoft denies them ...", "In terms of our being an 'established game publisher' [19], members of our team have written games in the past, and our Xbox Linux distribution runs such fine games as 'Tux vs Clippy' [14], 'Tux Racer' [15], and 'Frozen Bubble' [16]," and so on). In a nutshell, they don't seem to understand that Microsoft has every right to restrict what software runs on their console (see Nintendo, Sony, Sega, et al). There's no "denial of choice" -- if you want a computer, don't buy an XBox. And writing a few amateur games does not give one the title of "established game publisher". Maybe "established game developer", in which case they could try getting into Microsoft's incubator program for developers with a good idea but no publisher, but that's not going to happen for the XBox Linux project.
Microsoft is responsible for making sure that only quality software (err ... let's ignore stuff like Kabuki Warriors, eh? All consoles have to have their share of stinkers ...) is released for their console. Otherwise, we'd be right back in 1984 and the last video game crash. A major contributing factor was Atari's lack of certification for games, and the subsequent glut of pure crap. Do we want to go back to that? I know I don't.
Finally, there are definitely piracy issues here. Right now, while it's not exactly difficult to modify an XBox, it's at least a small barrier of entry to the pirate underground. As well, it makes for a fantastic way to keep cheaters off of XBox Live. How simple would it be to write a small loader for copied games or cheats when you start from an open platform like Linux? If this gets certified (fat chance), the mod chip barrier to entry is no longer there, making it trivial to pirate games or cheat online. You can say what you will about piracy (piracy sucks, imho), but I think everybody will agree that online cheaters are teh suck.
I'm sure there are plenty of projects out there that use Qt. Qt has been around for a very long time, and is quite mature. This isn't something that just sprang up overnight.
That depends on how libX is integrated into your project. Do you actively develop libX in your source tree, making changes to it and building it at the same time you build your product? If so, then you need to rebuilt it nightly (you can get cute, and look at changelists for your build and not rebuild some portions of your tree based on that, but it'll usually take about as long to determine that as it would to just build the thing).
However, if libX is developed by another team, you shouldn't be building the source code at all. Take drops of the library (and maybe that means you take source code drops and build the lib once yourself, or you take binary drops), and only when there are significant changes in libX that would benefit your product. That way, you're not rebuilding libX, and you're fairly well-protected against changes in libX (you only get a new libX if you need a bugfix or new feature).
What was the last contribution you made to this nebulous "community"? Or are you only interested in "taking from the community" (running the software for free) without giving something in return? Pot, kettle, black, eh?
(and if in my ultimate wisdom I've chosen to pick on one of the few active open source developers also on Slashdot, my apologies -- however, the majority of people never have and never will contribute anything to "the community", myself included.)
Duh. However, my point was that I had not heard about these "extra" companies, and was wondering exactly what the AC meant. Thanks for the explanation.
That's what I would call a "publishing deal", as I said before. EA is still EA, and Square is still Square, so I don't get the "set up two companies" part.
EA and SquareSoft have a publishing deal, and that's all (that I know of -- EA very likely owns some stock in Square, but certainly not enough for a controlling interest). Sony owns a minority interest in the company, after bailing them out from the Final Fantasy Movie failure (sad, really, because the movie had much promise but didn't deliver). And now Enix and Square merged, with Enix likely to be the dominant side of the merger. However, this is a dupe in a way, though it would've better been noted as an item in Slashdback. "Hey, remember that article about Enix and Square merging? Well, they've done it!" Or something like that.
You make good points, but I didn't want to associate Valve as a content creator, as they also did a lot of framework work in the Half-Life engine -- Half-Life is not simply Quake 1 with new graphics and possibly some gameplay additions (like Wheel of Time was to Unreal, or SiN was to Quake 2, or FAKK2 was to Quake 3, etc). In that vein, the Counter-Strike team is similar to (but lesser than) those development houses -- most everything is already there for them in the framework, they just supply some gameplay tweaks and new graphics, and stamp out a game. Lines blur, of course (where does American McGee's Alice fall in the Framework v. Content division? Or what about Deus Ex v. Unreal or Anachronox v. Quake 2?), but there seems to generally be two types of content providers -- those that don't need to highly modify the engine, and those that do. Counter-Strike, TF, WoT, FAKK2, etc (even Daikatana, which is pretty sad considering it took so long to release, yet didn't really add much to the genre) fall into the former category, imho. Half-Life, Deus Ex, Anachronox, Alice, etc fall into the latter.
Modifiable games are cool, because it gives people an entrance into the game development world. However, when game developers are hiring mod developers to create games, you end up with games that many times are little more than modifications (not that this is a bad thing, of course). There are exceptions (Steven Polge, now of Epic, for example -- wrote the first decent bot for Quake, the Reaper Bot, and now does most (all?) of the AI work for Epic's UT franchise; Zoid, of Quake 1 CTF fame and the linux ports of Quake 1/2, now works at Retro Studios, and helped create Metroid Prime; the TeamFortress guys that were hired by Valve to create the vaporware stand-alone TeamFortress 2, etc), but every rule has exceptions.