"If Microsoft was in "jail," it would affect many parts of the economy"
Indeed, the economy would bloom, and the computer market would develop at unheard of speeds because the biggest obstacle to any new computer technology just got removed from the equation.
"Um, that "large group of people" happens to be the shareholders, who are rightly excluded from being held liable."
Sounds like you're a shareholder. Liability should fall even MORESO on the shareholders, it's their company, they'd better damned-well keep TIGHT reins on what the hell is happening and they'd better be FULLY INFORMED of every business decision. FULL LIABILITY. Hiring someone else to take care of your business, thus leaving you blissfully ignorant of what is happening as long as money rolls in, is not an excuse.
"Im sure there was something deep down in the fine print that will derail a suit."
Bullshit. When parents find out their children are being used for profit-making without their consent, not only is it going to be a shitstorm but it just might get COPPA reinstated. Never underestimate the backlash of millions of pissed off parents. Many of them will do absolutely psychotic things to defend their children from any perceived threat.
Also, since these guys are apparently trying to beat the laws of the universe, can't we just have these guys labeled as insane by some professional psychologist?
That's like trying to tell the stars in the universe to e ligmitht in the form of encrypted ones and zeroes instead of photons - it just isn't fucking happening because the majority of the universe, physics and all, works on analog, not digital.
If I can see this content, I can record it, period. There's not one fucking thing you can do to stop it.
"Using a version of Internet Explorer that is how old, and knows how little about modern web technologies?"
Actually I'd just use an older version of firefox with a few plugins. Oldversion.com - because newer isn't ALWAYS better.
"And how many features does your Outlook have? I know you can't use webmail because you're using a version of IE that can't do shit."
Gmail has a regular HTML display option for email - try again.
"The capabilities of Quake 3 are nowhere near those of modern games."
The Q3 engine is open-sourced and has been extensively and heavily modified. The engine itself is more efficient and actually handles more detail. In fact, iD software is the premier engine developer, and the Q3 engine is so customizable that with just some tweaking you can get much better looking graphics. Actually, the engine is so efficient that extremely high polygon count models would still render pretty easily even on older Geforce 6 hardware.
"Ah, but can you do 1080p video?"
Software 1080p only requires a 2GHz P4 and 256MB of RAM (That's my old system spec from early 2000, was watching 1080p fansubs) Get a video card that handles it natively on the board and you can get away with only a 1GHz processor.
"Calculators do simple math. I bet your calculator can't brute force an MD5 hash at 600 million attempts per second."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=767419 - who needs speed? It can be done, it will be done. yea it'll take years on the TI-83's 8MHz cpu but it could still get it done.
"Sorry old man, but computers from 10 years ago just aren't capable of things that today's computers are."
Only games. Everything else can and has been done on older computers, pretty well might I add, maybe not REALTIME but it still gets done. All those super-awesome CGI scenes you saw in movies back in the late 90s? Yea, quite a few of those were done on machines that don't break the 300MHz barrier, and were lucky to even have 256MB of RAM in both video and system memory combined. Music tracks? Yep, been done a loooong time on old computers. 3D modeling/CAD? Yup, been done and is still done on old computers (go take a tour of the Carvin guitar factory, they're still using machines from the early 80's running some variant of UNIX.) Text processing? Been doing that since before the days of monochrome screens. Spreadsheets, graphs, plotting? Yep, those too.
Sorry, but computers even back then were capable of doing pretty much anything you wanted with them. Whether or not you got results back in realtime is an entirely different matter.
"It just can't handle all of those high res textures"
Which is why you procedurally generate them instead of making huge texture maps that need to be stored in memory. The PS3 is perfectly capable of doing this on the fly.
No need to port it - both the 360 and PS3 use the Cell SDK for program design so porting shouldn't be necessary, just a little re-write of the control and network stuff to handle the inconsistent 'standards' Microsoft claims to follow but breaks in reality.
"256MB just isn't enough to be useful for anything."
Give me a Win98 machine with 256MB of XDR. Bam, I've got web, email, games up to things like Q3 and derivatives (assuming proper video card,) can do video, and hell I can run fruity Loops and cool Edit pro at the same time so I can compose and master musical scores. Fuck, I only need maybe 2K of RAM to have an operating calculator, and with a calculator alone of today's power I could design a fucking nuke, which they did back then on a machine bigger than any house you've ever been in that used vacuum tubes and required two air conditioners for every ten linear feet of computer.
You're probably too young to know this but the very same shit you're doing today was done many years ago on less capable hardware with good programmers sitting in the chair. Most programmers today ARE NOT WORTH SHIT AND THAT IS WHY 256MB OF RAM IS NOT ENOUGH.
You know, bunches of games do disk swapping on a PC, but that little PS3 running the same game doesn't disk swap at all and looks comparatively the same, and it's doing it with less RAM than we find in modern computers.
"256MB isn't enough for modern desktop computing."
I'd bet a fuckton of Amiga and Commodore64 users would laugh in your face right now.
Since gaming is the most intensive thing most any computer can do nowdays (besides pure astrophysics calculations) if a little PS3 with 256MB of RAM can run the same game that requires 2GB on a PC I'd say 256 Megs is plenty for modern computing - Current OSes don't offer much of jack shit over what windows 98 offered and windows 98 did all that fun shit just fine with 128 megs or LESS, besides the latest and greatest shiny directX and a better file system and some enhanced security that should've been present in the first place.
Sony didn't make it a challenge. I thought that so at first, but guess what? It was the hypervisor restricting all the access. Hypervisor's gone, all that's left is to hack the firmware to allow installing another OS. If anything, Sony's likely made it easier to get Linux running.
That 256 megs of 4GHz XDR eats up your puny 4GB of 1066MHz DDR2 without thinking twice, in clock speed, latency, and actual bandwidth throughput.
It uses an nVidia graphics the RSX core, which is pretty much a hyped-up Geforce 7800.
It sucked because of the hypervisor. They just removed it. Time for custom firmware to re-enable installing a third-party OS and time for direct access to the hardware.
2TFLOP supercomputer at your fingertips. The best high-end gaming PCs can barely hit 1TFLOP with all their hardware combined.
"I'd rather get a Dell computer that comes with more than 256 MB of RAM for my $400 thank you very much."
If you only had a CLUE as to what that 256MB of XDR will do. 4 GHz RAM (What's your puny DDR3 running?) and a smaller form factor (74 pin vs 200+) and more power efficient IIRC. Oh, what's the bandwidth on your DDR3? Up to 1.6 gigabit per second max? XDR does up to 4.8 gigabit per second max.
Basically that 256MB of XDR kicks the crap out of 3-4GB of DDR2 or 2GB of DDR3 without thinking about it.
I own a PS3 and PC, and from what I see at the game shelves at GameStop a LARGE majority of PS3 games are also available on PC. UT3, GTAIV, GRID, Prototype, and much, much more.
The Slim PS3 might be more hackable without the hypervisor being around. Odds are greater that one could better unlock the power of the PS3 since there's no hypervisor restricting access to the hardware directly.
PS3 gives you that for free without paying. Value added my ass.
"You get dedicated servers"
As long as M$ sees it fit to continue keeping the servers active (ie as long as they make a profit from online play of that game.)
"And really, there's more features I don't feel like getting into right now, but listen. If you don't own the system, you don't have room to talk."
Actually, I repair the systems and am M$ certified to do so. I know the ins and outs of the system BETTER than most anybody but the designers and hackers and game devs, so I've got room to talk. I also did XBOXLIVE support for the first-gen XBOX console. Most anything you pay for from MS you get for free from other companies.
"From last I checked, most commercial pc mmorpg's have a monthly fee."
Only because they don't allow you to run your own server instance. Pay once for the game, then pay again to use software you paid for - people with a lick of common sense call that a ripoff, morons think it's a value deal.
"If people didn't like 360's they wouldn't sell"
Units moved != units sold. Considering all the RRoDs around and more than 50% of XBOX hardware failing before warranty even gets CLOSE to ending, and you see why MS is losing to Nintendo in unit sales. and M$ is going to try entering the handheld market next - Nintendo is going to seriously stomp them into the ground. Not even the full-color Sega Game Gear could compete with the black and white Nintendo Game Boy, just imagine trying to compete with the DSi?
None? really? FUCKING REALLY? What about the recent port/remakle of Marvel vs Capcom 2, eh? How about the most recent remake of the old NES 1942 for the 360? Trials HD is just a wannabe remake of fucking EXCITEBIKE for the NES with physics and 3D graphics.
Are you that out of touch with reality? Or are you just that young, given your incredibly high UID?
"enough of this crap. we want the zelda game intended for the wii and chrono trigger on virtual console. get off your fat asses plz plz"
Fuck that. I want the goddamned games that aren't a rehash of the same shit over and over and over again. Zelda's been the same damned thing since the N64. Chrono Trigger just got a DS rerelease. Metroid Prime Trilogy just got reported and re-coded to work flawlessly with the Wii.
To quote an old UPN commercial from the 90s - "BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, TIME FOR SOMETHING NEW! ISN'T THERE ANYTHING NEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWW?"
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm a patent attorney, but this post is not legal advice. It's for entertainment purposes only"
You have no clue how much you sound like Fox news right now.
"If Microsoft was in "jail," it would affect many parts of the economy"
Indeed, the economy would bloom, and the computer market would develop at unheard of speeds because the biggest obstacle to any new computer technology just got removed from the equation.
"Um, that "large group of people" happens to be the shareholders, who are rightly excluded from being held liable."
Sounds like you're a shareholder. Liability should fall even MORESO on the shareholders, it's their company, they'd better damned-well keep TIGHT reins on what the hell is happening and they'd better be FULLY INFORMED of every business decision. FULL LIABILITY. Hiring someone else to take care of your business, thus leaving you blissfully ignorant of what is happening as long as money rolls in, is not an excuse.
"Im sure there was something deep down in the fine print that will derail a suit."
Bullshit. When parents find out their children are being used for profit-making without their consent, not only is it going to be a shitstorm but it just might get COPPA reinstated.
Never underestimate the backlash of millions of pissed off parents. Many of them will do absolutely psychotic things to defend their children from any perceived threat.
"All guns SHOULD be illegal for anybody to own or use."
You keep on telling yourself that while I SLOWLY STAB YOU TO DEATH WITH A FORK. Bet you'll wish I had a gun, then.
e ligmitht = emit light.
Also, since these guys are apparently trying to beat the laws of the universe, can't we just have these guys labeled as insane by some professional psychologist?
That's like trying to tell the stars in the universe to e ligmitht in the form of encrypted ones and zeroes instead of photons - it just isn't fucking happening because the majority of the universe, physics and all, works on analog, not digital.
If I can see this content, I can record it, period. There's not one fucking thing you can do to stop it.
He says none of those games are emulated or remakes
http://games.teamxbox.com/xbox-360/2248/Marvel-vs-Capcom-2/
http://games.teamxbox.com/xbox-360/1964/1942-Joint-Strike/
He's full of it and you're off on your google fu
"Using a version of Internet Explorer that is how old, and knows how little about modern web technologies?"
Actually I'd just use an older version of firefox with a few plugins. Oldversion.com - because newer isn't ALWAYS better.
"And how many features does your Outlook have? I know you can't use webmail because you're using a version of IE that can't do shit."
Gmail has a regular HTML display option for email - try again.
"The capabilities of Quake 3 are nowhere near those of modern games."
The Q3 engine is open-sourced and has been extensively and heavily modified. The engine itself is more efficient and actually handles more detail. In fact, iD software is the premier engine developer, and the Q3 engine is so customizable that with just some tweaking you can get much better looking graphics. Actually, the engine is so efficient that extremely high polygon count models would still render pretty easily even on older Geforce 6 hardware.
"Ah, but can you do 1080p video?"
Software 1080p only requires a 2GHz P4 and 256MB of RAM (That's my old system spec from early 2000, was watching 1080p fansubs) Get a video card that handles it natively on the board and you can get away with only a 1GHz processor.
"Calculators do simple math. I bet your calculator can't brute force an MD5 hash at 600 million attempts per second."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=767419 - who needs speed? It can be done, it will be done. yea it'll take years on the TI-83's 8MHz cpu but it could still get it done.
"Sorry old man, but computers from 10 years ago just aren't capable of things that today's computers are."
Only games. Everything else can and has been done on older computers, pretty well might I add, maybe not REALTIME but it still gets done. All those super-awesome CGI scenes you saw in movies back in the late 90s? Yea, quite a few of those were done on machines that don't break the 300MHz barrier, and were lucky to even have 256MB of RAM in both video and system memory combined. Music tracks? Yep, been done a loooong time on old computers. 3D modeling/CAD? Yup, been done and is still done on old computers (go take a tour of the Carvin guitar factory, they're still using machines from the early 80's running some variant of UNIX.) Text processing? Been doing that since before the days of monochrome screens. Spreadsheets, graphs, plotting? Yep, those too.
Sorry, but computers even back then were capable of doing pretty much anything you wanted with them. Whether or not you got results back in realtime is an entirely different matter.
"It just can't handle all of those high res textures"
Which is why you procedurally generate them instead of making huge texture maps that need to be stored in memory. The PS3 is perfectly capable of doing this on the fly.
No need to port it - both the 360 and PS3 use the Cell SDK for program design so porting shouldn't be necessary, just a little re-write of the control and network stuff to handle the inconsistent 'standards' Microsoft claims to follow but breaks in reality.
"256MB just isn't enough to be useful for anything."
Give me a Win98 machine with 256MB of XDR. Bam, I've got web, email, games up to things like Q3 and derivatives (assuming proper video card,) can do video, and hell I can run fruity Loops and cool Edit pro at the same time so I can compose and master musical scores. Fuck, I only need maybe 2K of RAM to have an operating calculator, and with a calculator alone of today's power I could design a fucking nuke, which they did back then on a machine bigger than any house you've ever been in that used vacuum tubes and required two air conditioners for every ten linear feet of computer.
You're probably too young to know this but the very same shit you're doing today was done many years ago on less capable hardware with good programmers sitting in the chair. Most programmers today ARE NOT WORTH SHIT AND THAT IS WHY 256MB OF RAM IS NOT ENOUGH.
You know, bunches of games do disk swapping on a PC, but that little PS3 running the same game doesn't disk swap at all and looks comparatively the same, and it's doing it with less RAM than we find in modern computers.
LEARN EFFICIENT AND COMPACT PROGRAMING.
"256MB isn't enough for modern desktop computing."
I'd bet a fuckton of Amiga and Commodore64 users would laugh in your face right now.
Since gaming is the most intensive thing most any computer can do nowdays (besides pure astrophysics calculations) if a little PS3 with 256MB of RAM can run the same game that requires 2GB on a PC I'd say 256 Megs is plenty for modern computing - Current OSes don't offer much of jack shit over what windows 98 offered and windows 98 did all that fun shit just fine with 128 megs or LESS, besides the latest and greatest shiny directX and a better file system and some enhanced security that should've been present in the first place.
If every PS3 game you own is an exclusive then you're just a fanboy.
Last count, out of 130 titles I've looked at, 82 have either a PC port or were originally developed on PC and ported to PS3.
They said Metal Gear Solid 4 was going to be PS3 exclusive - guess what bucko? 360's about to get it.
Sony didn't make it a challenge. I thought that so at first, but guess what? It was the hypervisor restricting all the access. Hypervisor's gone, all that's left is to hack the firmware to allow installing another OS. If anything, Sony's likely made it easier to get Linux running.
I'll save myself from repeating and just point you out to this:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/products/dram/Products_XDRDRAM.html
That 256 megs of 4GHz XDR eats up your puny 4GB of 1066MHz DDR2 without thinking twice, in clock speed, latency, and actual bandwidth throughput.
It uses an nVidia graphics the RSX core, which is pretty much a hyped-up Geforce 7800.
It sucked because of the hypervisor. They just removed it. Time for custom firmware to re-enable installing a third-party OS and time for direct access to the hardware.
2TFLOP supercomputer at your fingertips. The best high-end gaming PCs can barely hit 1TFLOP with all their hardware combined.
"I'd rather get a Dell computer that comes with more than 256 MB of RAM for my $400 thank you very much."
If you only had a CLUE as to what that 256MB of XDR will do. 4 GHz RAM (What's your puny DDR3 running?) and a smaller form factor (74 pin vs 200+) and more power efficient IIRC. Oh, what's the bandwidth on your DDR3? Up to 1.6 gigabit per second max? XDR does up to 4.8 gigabit per second max.
Basically that 256MB of XDR kicks the crap out of 3-4GB of DDR2 or 2GB of DDR3 without thinking about it.
That 256MB of XDR will kick the crap out of any 1GB of DDR2.
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/products/dram/Products_XDRDRAM.html
What matters is how you USE the memory to achieve the highest performance.
Wait, what?
I own a PS3 and PC, and from what I see at the game shelves at GameStop a LARGE majority of PS3 games are also available on PC. UT3, GTAIV, GRID, Prototype, and much, much more.
Oh, look, there's Orange Box for the PS3.
The Slim PS3 might be more hackable without the hypervisor being around. Odds are greater that one could better unlock the power of the PS3 since there's no hypervisor restricting access to the hardware directly.
"you get voice chat to any person you play"
PS3 gives you that for free without paying. Value added my ass.
"You get dedicated servers"
As long as M$ sees it fit to continue keeping the servers active (ie as long as they make a profit from online play of that game.)
"And really, there's more features I don't feel like getting into right now, but listen. If you don't own the system, you don't have room to talk."
Actually, I repair the systems and am M$ certified to do so. I know the ins and outs of the system BETTER than most anybody but the designers and hackers and game devs, so I've got room to talk. I also did XBOXLIVE support for the first-gen XBOX console. Most anything you pay for from MS you get for free from other companies.
"From last I checked, most commercial pc mmorpg's have a monthly fee."
Only because they don't allow you to run your own server instance. Pay once for the game, then pay again to use software you paid for - people with a lick of common sense call that a ripoff, morons think it's a value deal.
"If people didn't like 360's they wouldn't sell"
Units moved != units sold. Considering all the RRoDs around and more than 50% of XBOX hardware failing before warranty even gets CLOSE to ending, and you see why MS is losing to Nintendo in unit sales. and M$ is going to try entering the handheld market next - Nintendo is going to seriously stomp them into the ground. Not even the full-color Sega Game Gear could compete with the black and white Nintendo Game Boy, just imagine trying to compete with the DSi?
None? really? FUCKING REALLY? What about the recent port/remakle of Marvel vs Capcom 2, eh? How about the most recent remake of the old NES 1942 for the 360? Trials HD is just a wannabe remake of fucking EXCITEBIKE for the NES with physics and 3D graphics.
Are you that out of touch with reality? Or are you just that young, given your incredibly high UID?
If the software advertises itself as Flash 9, it better fucking be flash 9. Plain and simple.
"enough of this crap. we want the zelda game intended for the wii and chrono trigger on virtual console. get off your fat asses plz plz"
Fuck that. I want the goddamned games that aren't a rehash of the same shit over and over and over again. Zelda's been the same damned thing since the N64. Chrono Trigger just got a DS rerelease. Metroid Prime Trilogy just got reported and re-coded to work flawlessly with the Wii.
To quote an old UPN commercial from the 90s - "BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, TIME FOR SOMETHING NEW! ISN'T THERE ANYTHING NEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWW?"