they are concerned that a program they get for "Red Hat" might not work for "Mandriva".
What makes matters worse is that it's not a clear yes or no. It comes down to terms such as it might work, should work, or probably won't work. Incompatibilities can either be blatant, nonexistent, or sinisterly lurking someplace from which they can leap out and bite us in the bum later.
We know that basically the same software is available for all of linux, but the packaging and distribution puts some compatibility issues not on the source (which I think stays very true), but on the end product. It is a difficulty of running linux, but, in a sense, FreeBSD also falls into this group. Most of the selfsame software is also available for FreeBSD with similar strings attached.
With open source, it's both a blessing and a curse, though I personally have always found FreeBSD's ports to be more or less a safe haven from that jungle. Mmmm...ports.
It's great how the fancy graphical installation screen crashes back to an ugly terminal font in Screen10.
That's the bootloader, you nut. Even Fedora Core's bootloader uses that "ugly terminal font," just with different colors. Windows NT/2000/XP's bootloader looks like that too (and if you push the right buttons while booting your Mac, you'll get (you guessed it) a text-mode command prompt/boot loader (ie openfirmware). As with OpenFirmware, the FreeBSD bootloader can be configured silent so as not to display that menu). Sheesh. We give you KDE and you give us this hogwash about our installer. >:(
We don't need anymore forks of our favorite BSD projects. They're complete and perfect on their own, thank you! One of the classic benefits of BSD was that there were very few systems to choose from. The uniformity of the systems and cooperation within the projects was legendery (with some exception). All of these spinoffs of FreeBSD are making me nervous. I don't want it to go all linux on me.:-/ I have a hard enough time as it is distro hopping. When will the madness end?
I've heard this before on previous Slashdot stories, I seem to remember that every documented case of this has occurred in Korea. Not necessarily death, but also incidents like the boy who robbed his parents of their retirement money and went off to play games.
I've heard that gaming has become very deeply rooted in Korean culture. It's so much more important there than it is anywhere else in the world, or so I've heard (television channels devoted to broadcasting multiplayer games, etc).
I heard inflation mentioned in another post, and I thought it would be a more interesting topic to focus on. What about inflation?
Let's not even begin to get into how real economies work (suffice it to say that the whole thing is a big mess).
Don't MMORPG's suffer from constant inflation? There is usually a limitless supply of money and goods. Shops in these sorts of games typically have limitless supplies. Take into account supply and demand. The supply is infinite (given enough time), and the demand is finite. In theory, this drives down the value of everything in the game to nothing, even special items.
In terms of availability, there is no such thing as scarcity. Our fundamental theories of economics involve the limited supply of goods, but what happens in the face of a never-ending stream? How can economy exist! There's no intrinsically economic reason why EVERYBODY can't have the best items in the game. So why don't they?
The only constraint is time. People need to spend time to accumulate enough of this infinite stock, but it's within the grasp of everyone. Very equalizing, isn't it?
These games have a perfect socialist utopia where supply is a non-issue and prices/wages are fixed and proportional. You get out what you put into it, basically, and people are supposed to get what they deserve.
Enter the evil that is capitalism and human greed. Using real world cash, people are able to abuse the game system and give themselves an unfair advantage. These people now have access to supplies they didn't earn and don't deserve.
Make whatever argument you will about how said people function and make money in the real world, but the game world is not the real world. They don't belong together, and their economies are not supposed to be connected in any way other than the basic game fees one pays as a client.
Don't let capitalism destroy our gaming community! The games are designed by their creators to be fair and balanced. They are not supposed to be subject to class separation, which worms it's way in thanks to "real money." I say we do everything in our power to protect our idealistic little game worlds and give a decent playing experience to everyone rather than a select few who can afford it.
People pay others to wash their cars, mow their lawns, and do other simple work for them everyday. Why? For some it is because they are lazy, but for most it is because their time is worth more than the money paid out and that is the key to the whole argument.
You see, but it's not worth more, you pig. No man's time is worth more than that of another.
the buck never stops. you are being delusional if you think it does.
Not delusional, but idealistic (if there is indeed a difference).
First of all, I'm not a capitalist, and yes, I'm fighting the idea of abusing games in this way. I understand the how's and why's, but that doesn't stop me from resenting it and saying "no."
In the end, people can do whatever they want, but I'm siding with any effort to prevent them from doing something like this.
Okay, I think it's our job here on/. to do a good dead for the world and fight back! Nobody does the internet like we do, so I think we're the people who ought to step up to the plate.
Right. So here's what we do: every time we find a website being run by one of these terrorists, we make/. article of it and post a link on the main page. The traffic to their site will be so great that they'll be forced to shut down! In this way we can exterminate terrorism from the web.
The time that you spend playing video games indeed has no value. At least, not economically. It does have entertainment value for you, but that's where the buck stops.
I've posted on this subject before (and rather passionately). The past article was about property rights in a virtual world (ie MMORPGs and the like). It's just ludicrous. Now it's about currency value...
I love games. I love to play these games; my girlfriend and I play a MMORPG together and think it's great. It is great to collect virtual money and spend it in entertaining ways, notwithstanding getting awesome items and equipment.
That being said, the currency is worthless. Just plain worthless. Virtual assets don't exist; they're intangible. They're in a proprietary gameworld and if they belong to anyone they belong to the company that is providing the game. Also, trying to assign real value to items in-game by exchanging them for things outside the game like money is strictly prohibited in the license agreement of most games.
Come on, people! The state should never be involved in this sort of thing.
If it's open, then why don't we just create a 3rd party implementation? Surely this library will be faster and more enhanced the Microsoft's OGL support.
This guy had the same theory that I did. It's a good idea.
Either I don't understand or you don't understand, but one of us is having a misundersting. When the original poster said wrapper environment, we assume that all the necessary API layers are in place. Accessing these special "xbox specific" formats would be part of the API or something in the original game source. As for GPU emulation, this is also taken care of by the API wrapper, which will make sure xbox instructions get handled via 360 routines. In response to needing a CPU emulator, the whole point of recompiling is so this is not necessary; the ported binaries will run natively on the 360's processor. Big endian? Little endian? The compiler takes care of that.
What is of chief concern in the porting scenario is whether or not the game in question contains non-portable code (assembler, for example).
The original poster is drawing on a concept similar to that of winelib, if you know how that works. With winelib, you compile your Windows source and get a native linux binary. Ta-da! I'm guessing you think his idea is more like wine, which tries to execute native windows binaries. In a wine situation, different CPU and GPU do indeed pose a problem. In a winelib situation, they don't. Is this what you meant?
Ah yes.:-) I do love ZSNES and MAME, and those are first class examples of first class emulation.
If done perfectly, emulation is very poweful and reliable. I'm merely worried that not enough time and energy can be spent before the shipment date of the 360 in order to build such a great emulator. Perhaps I underestimate Microsoft, but we all know how many years of development it took for programs like ZSNES to win the sort of compatibility it has.
Rather than saying emulation sucks, I should qualify that poor emulation sucks, and I hope you'll agree that we stand a chance of receiving less than ideal emulation from our friends at Redmond.
Plus, AFAIK it's not just recompiling, they also would have to rewrite any bits written in x86 assembler (probably rare) or direct calls to the Xbox nvidia graphics card (less rare, I would think). And then go through QA again.
You're exactly right, which is what porting is. I guess recompiling implies that you haven't altered the source, which was a mistake in my wording. What I meant to say is first port the code and then compile the port.
Thinking about the compatibility situation, I came up with an interesting idea.
Why not port the titles? I don't know how large the games are, but you could have the developer port and recompile the game engine onto the XBox 360. Connect to XBox Live, insert your original game disc, have the XBox identify the disc for you and then download the new game binary (if available) onto its hard drive. Suddenly, the game runs perfectly.:-)
My father works for Sprint, and before that he worked for Radioshack. The most common problem they encountered was attempted consumer fraud. The correct policies were in place and the employees were trained enough not to let customers get away with any funny business. This sometimes illicited violent outbursts from the moron trying to rip off the store, but they never won.
Also, they track their sales well enough that if the warranty is determined void or the product return/refund is refused, ALL stores in the chain know about it. It's common for people to try fraud at multiple locations if they can't get it to work at one.
Let's say the consumer has old XBox game A. He loves to play A a lot. This guy buys an XBox 360; he heard it also plays original XBox titles. The fact that it only plays certain titles slips by him, and the marketing on the box is too slick to put enough emphasis on this fact. He tears open the box and tries to load his game. If he gets a message that says his game isn't supported, he'll scream and throw the new system out the window. If the game starts to load, and is playable (but only to a point, with lots of glitches/slowdowns/whathavyou), he'll get a serious bad impression of the 360. If the game loads but encounters a fatal error consistently during gameply, he'll scream even louder and throw the console through TWO windows.
Emulation sucks. When consumers get backwards compatibility, they expect 100%. That's what they've been getting so far. Partial compatibility will have buyers a little sore, and if Microsoft isn't VERY diplomatic about the gamer's experience, they might become downright angry, and lots of windows are going to get broken.
And just think; this ugly PR nightmare could all be solved by simply not attempting backwards compatibility. It's all or nothing, folks.
I'm certain that I was affected by video games. I was raised in a household where a personal computer was always present, even before there was one in every American home (this was because my dad was a Tandy employee).
I grew up playing computer games, and I was basically subject to the thoughts and opinions of the artists who created them. I'm certain the games left a deep impression on me, but not at all a negative one.
One of my favorite games to play was Quest for Glory. It was a serious game in some respects, but it could also be light-hearted (and chock full of bad-but-good-humored jokes). The main theme of the story, however, was to help others. The goal was to be a hero and make peoples' lives better. In one part of the game, even, a talking fox that you help offers to give you some advice, explicitly stating that, "It pays to be polite, even to rude people." That's a life lesson that lots of RPGs have taught, I believe, even if only implicitly.
Back then, games were mostly the same. The goal was always to help someone, save someone, fight criminals, bring justice, fight abusive authorities (successfully in all cases).
I'm sure lots of games are still like this today, but games are becoming a finer art. Like literature and movies, there is a lot more grey and moral ambiguity. Either way, we need to be more careful about the kinds of lessons we teach our children. Games affected how I turned out, and I'm thankful I was playing the right ones.
All game stores around here have been bought by "Gamestop." They sell many used games/console/accessories. While I think their prices on new items is competitive, the used items are sold for merely $2 less than their new counterparts. Also, on particular items (old but famous games), they overcharge heavily. Needless to say, I'm not pleased with the way they do business.
My theory is that waiting until later is the best strategy for selling to people who buy more than one console. Lots of people own more than one console (I know a friend who has a PS2, XBox, AND Gamecube).
If you release too close, you're telling consumers, "Okay, pick one." People don't want to spend too much money all at once. The company that forces this situation is the one that things it will be the first choice, and maybe Sony is having some reservations about this.
On the other hand, if they wait some years until the novelty of the XBox has worn off and peoples' wallets have had a chance to recover, there will be a fresh consumer budget to draw from. In this way, even people who have already purchased XBoxes are more likely to buy a PS3 in addition, and those who passed up the XBox will jump on the newcomer (good things come to those who wait).
I somehow don't understand how your prediction for the future is simply to state what is happening right now. Don't think it's possible that things JUST MIGHT be different?
I think it's anybody's game right now. I remember that consoles were much more separated when I was a kid. What kind of console you got really determined what kind of gaming experience you were going to have. Since the last batch, I started to see the lines blurring. The games were becoming similar, and there were a lot of multi-platform releases that you could play on all of them. These days it's much more neck-and-neck than it ever was, and it's only gotten worse. That's why I say everybody is in a potential position to take the lead.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes matters worse is that it's not a clear yes or no. It comes down to terms such as it might work, should work, or probably won't work. Incompatibilities can either be blatant, nonexistent, or sinisterly lurking someplace from which they can leap out and bite us in the bum later.
We know that basically the same software is available for all of linux, but the packaging and distribution puts some compatibility issues not on the source (which I think stays very true), but on the end product. It is a difficulty of running linux, but, in a sense, FreeBSD also falls into this group. Most of the selfsame software is also available for FreeBSD with similar strings attached.
With open source, it's both a blessing and a curse, though I personally have always found FreeBSD's ports to be more or less a safe haven from that jungle. Mmmm...ports.
Maybe when you have children, a spouse (maybe both), or a special pet, you will be more aware of this definition. :-)
I propose no absolute criteria for perfection and offer the title on purely subjective terms. In an absolutist sense, you're right.
Oh, okay. But you recognize my concern, right? ;-) These alternative distribution still give me the heebie-jeebies.
That's the bootloader, you nut. Even Fedora Core's bootloader uses that "ugly terminal font," just with different colors. Windows NT/2000/XP's bootloader looks like that too (and if you push the right buttons while booting your Mac, you'll get (you guessed it) a text-mode command prompt/boot loader (ie openfirmware). As with OpenFirmware, the FreeBSD bootloader can be configured silent so as not to display that menu). Sheesh. We give you KDE and you give us this hogwash about our installer. >:(
We don't need anymore forks of our favorite BSD projects. They're complete and perfect on their own, thank you! One of the classic benefits of BSD was that there were very few systems to choose from. The uniformity of the systems and cooperation within the projects was legendery (with some exception). All of these spinoffs of FreeBSD are making me nervous. I don't want it to go all linux on me. :-/ I have a hard enough time as it is distro hopping. When will the madness end?
I've heard that gaming has become very deeply rooted in Korean culture. It's so much more important there than it is anywhere else in the world, or so I've heard (television channels devoted to broadcasting multiplayer games, etc).
Why Korea? Why not Japan or Spain?
Let's not even begin to get into how real economies work (suffice it to say that the whole thing is a big mess).
Don't MMORPG's suffer from constant inflation? There is usually a limitless supply of money and goods. Shops in these sorts of games typically have limitless supplies. Take into account supply and demand. The supply is infinite (given enough time), and the demand is finite. In theory, this drives down the value of everything in the game to nothing, even special items.
In terms of availability, there is no such thing as scarcity. Our fundamental theories of economics involve the limited supply of goods, but what happens in the face of a never-ending stream? How can economy exist! There's no intrinsically economic reason why EVERYBODY can't have the best items in the game. So why don't they?
The only constraint is time. People need to spend time to accumulate enough of this infinite stock, but it's within the grasp of everyone. Very equalizing, isn't it?
These games have a perfect socialist utopia where supply is a non-issue and prices/wages are fixed and proportional. You get out what you put into it, basically, and people are supposed to get what they deserve.
Enter the evil that is capitalism and human greed. Using real world cash, people are able to abuse the game system and give themselves an unfair advantage. These people now have access to supplies they didn't earn and don't deserve.
Make whatever argument you will about how said people function and make money in the real world, but the game world is not the real world. They don't belong together, and their economies are not supposed to be connected in any way other than the basic game fees one pays as a client.
Don't let capitalism destroy our gaming community! The games are designed by their creators to be fair and balanced. They are not supposed to be subject to class separation, which worms it's way in thanks to "real money." I say we do everything in our power to protect our idealistic little game worlds and give a decent playing experience to everyone rather than a select few who can afford it.
You see, but it's not worth more, you pig. No man's time is worth more than that of another.
Not delusional, but idealistic (if there is indeed a difference).
First of all, I'm not a capitalist, and yes, I'm fighting the idea of abusing games in this way. I understand the how's and why's, but that doesn't stop me from resenting it and saying "no."
In the end, people can do whatever they want, but I'm siding with any effort to prevent them from doing something like this.
It does, which is precisely why you're paying for it. You pay the service, not vice versa.
Right. So here's what we do: every time we find a website being run by one of these terrorists, we make /. article of it and post a link on the main page. The traffic to their site will be so great that they'll be forced to shut down! In this way we can exterminate terrorism from the web.
The time that you spend playing video games indeed has no value. At least, not economically. It does have entertainment value for you, but that's where the buck stops.
I love games. I love to play these games; my girlfriend and I play a MMORPG together and think it's great. It is great to collect virtual money and spend it in entertaining ways, notwithstanding getting awesome items and equipment.
That being said, the currency is worthless. Just plain worthless. Virtual assets don't exist; they're intangible. They're in a proprietary gameworld and if they belong to anyone they belong to the company that is providing the game. Also, trying to assign real value to items in-game by exchanging them for things outside the game like money is strictly prohibited in the license agreement of most games.
Come on, people! The state should never be involved in this sort of thing.
If it's open, then why don't we just create a 3rd party implementation? Surely this library will be faster and more enhanced the Microsoft's OGL support.
This guy had the same theory that I did. It's a good idea.
Either I don't understand or you don't understand, but one of us is having a misundersting. When the original poster said wrapper environment, we assume that all the necessary API layers are in place. Accessing these special "xbox specific" formats would be part of the API or something in the original game source. As for GPU emulation, this is also taken care of by the API wrapper, which will make sure xbox instructions get handled via 360 routines. In response to needing a CPU emulator, the whole point of recompiling is so this is not necessary; the ported binaries will run natively on the 360's processor. Big endian? Little endian? The compiler takes care of that.
What is of chief concern in the porting scenario is whether or not the game in question contains non-portable code (assembler, for example).
The original poster is drawing on a concept similar to that of winelib, if you know how that works. With winelib, you compile your Windows source and get a native linux binary. Ta-da! I'm guessing you think his idea is more like wine, which tries to execute native windows binaries. In a wine situation, different CPU and GPU do indeed pose a problem. In a winelib situation, they don't. Is this what you meant?
If done perfectly, emulation is very poweful and reliable. I'm merely worried that not enough time and energy can be spent before the shipment date of the 360 in order to build such a great emulator. Perhaps I underestimate Microsoft, but we all know how many years of development it took for programs like ZSNES to win the sort of compatibility it has.
Rather than saying emulation sucks, I should qualify that poor emulation sucks, and I hope you'll agree that we stand a chance of receiving less than ideal emulation from our friends at Redmond.
You're exactly right, which is what porting is. I guess recompiling implies that you haven't altered the source, which was a mistake in my wording. What I meant to say is first port the code and then compile the port.
Why not port the titles? I don't know how large the games are, but you could have the developer port and recompile the game engine onto the XBox 360. Connect to XBox Live, insert your original game disc, have the XBox identify the disc for you and then download the new game binary (if available) onto its hard drive. Suddenly, the game runs perfectly. :-)
Also, they track their sales well enough that if the warranty is determined void or the product return/refund is refused, ALL stores in the chain know about it. It's common for people to try fraud at multiple locations if they can't get it to work at one.
Are you implying that this justifies retail fraud? If so, I hate you.
Let's say the consumer has old XBox game A. He loves to play A a lot. This guy buys an XBox 360; he heard it also plays original XBox titles. The fact that it only plays certain titles slips by him, and the marketing on the box is too slick to put enough emphasis on this fact. He tears open the box and tries to load his game. If he gets a message that says his game isn't supported, he'll scream and throw the new system out the window. If the game starts to load, and is playable (but only to a point, with lots of glitches/slowdowns/whathavyou), he'll get a serious bad impression of the 360. If the game loads but encounters a fatal error consistently during gameply, he'll scream even louder and throw the console through TWO windows.
Emulation sucks. When consumers get backwards compatibility, they expect 100%. That's what they've been getting so far. Partial compatibility will have buyers a little sore, and if Microsoft isn't VERY diplomatic about the gamer's experience, they might become downright angry, and lots of windows are going to get broken.
And just think; this ugly PR nightmare could all be solved by simply not attempting backwards compatibility. It's all or nothing, folks.
I grew up playing computer games, and I was basically subject to the thoughts and opinions of the artists who created them. I'm certain the games left a deep impression on me, but not at all a negative one.
One of my favorite games to play was Quest for Glory. It was a serious game in some respects, but it could also be light-hearted (and chock full of bad-but-good-humored jokes). The main theme of the story, however, was to help others. The goal was to be a hero and make peoples' lives better. In one part of the game, even, a talking fox that you help offers to give you some advice, explicitly stating that, "It pays to be polite, even to rude people." That's a life lesson that lots of RPGs have taught, I believe, even if only implicitly.
Back then, games were mostly the same. The goal was always to help someone, save someone, fight criminals, bring justice, fight abusive authorities (successfully in all cases).
I'm sure lots of games are still like this today, but games are becoming a finer art. Like literature and movies, there is a lot more grey and moral ambiguity. Either way, we need to be more careful about the kinds of lessons we teach our children. Games affected how I turned out, and I'm thankful I was playing the right ones.
All game stores around here have been bought by "Gamestop." They sell many used games/console/accessories. While I think their prices on new items is competitive, the used items are sold for merely $2 less than their new counterparts. Also, on particular items (old but famous games), they overcharge heavily. Needless to say, I'm not pleased with the way they do business.
If you release too close, you're telling consumers, "Okay, pick one." People don't want to spend too much money all at once. The company that forces this situation is the one that things it will be the first choice, and maybe Sony is having some reservations about this.
On the other hand, if they wait some years until the novelty of the XBox has worn off and peoples' wallets have had a chance to recover, there will be a fresh consumer budget to draw from. In this way, even people who have already purchased XBoxes are more likely to buy a PS3 in addition, and those who passed up the XBox will jump on the newcomer (good things come to those who wait).
I think it's anybody's game right now. I remember that consoles were much more separated when I was a kid. What kind of console you got really determined what kind of gaming experience you were going to have. Since the last batch, I started to see the lines blurring. The games were becoming similar, and there were a lot of multi-platform releases that you could play on all of them. These days it's much more neck-and-neck than it ever was, and it's only gotten worse. That's why I say everybody is in a potential position to take the lead.