Re:that doesn't mean they'll produce good games
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
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· Score: 3, Informative
Er, no. MS probably make somewhere in the region of $5 to $10 for every Xbox game sold in licencing fees. That's regardless of whether they are the developer or publisher of that title. In the case where they are both developer and publisher (as is now the case with Rare titles) the revenue per title is more likely to be in the $20 to $25 per unit range.
Rare's titles have sold an average of around 1.4 million each throughout their history. Let's suppose they manage to do half that in future. Revenue for MS from each Rare title might therefore be around the $14-21M range.
Suppose Rare ship another 5 titles over the lifetime of the Xbox. That's getting up to $100M in revenue. Now factor in the extra bonus of having more quality titles on Xbox - which should increase console sales and therefore revenue for all other games sales. Suddenly, it looks like MS's increased revenue as a result of the purchase might be quite substantial, and the purchase price of $375M looks like not a bad deal at all.
all he said was that MS is acting as though you are gaining something from this 'securing' when really its just securing said box from its owners. Er no, he said quite a bit more than that. He said that we should all boycott the Xbox because it would somehow be good for competition in the games industry. I just fail to see how. Microsoft imposes restrictions on what you can do with your Xbox - just like Sony does with the PS2 and Nintendo does with the GameCube. Surely the existence of the Xbox adds more competition to the games console business, not less? Or does it only count when other people compete against Microsoft, not the other way around?
My bad...thought this was the same poster. My point still stands though - arguing not to buy from Microsoft in general is a completely different argument to saying "don't buy product X because I can't run software of my choice on it".
Okay, but that's a whole different argument. You're saying that you won't buy products from Microsoft because of their general corporate history. That's all fine and dandy, but it's not really the point you originally seemed to be making. It looked like originally you were arguing that you shouldn't buy Xbox because it was closed and Microsoft were preventing people from modding it and running software of their choosing on it. Which is a pretty weak argument, unless you're prepared to apply to same standard to Sony and Nintendo and boycott their consoles too (which I'm guessing you haven't).
Yes, obviously the major motivation is to cut software piracy, which is a pretty dubious usage of the word 'security'. On the other hand, another motivation is to increase security for online games - if the box isn't hacked, then games can be more secured against cheaters. Personally, I quite like the idea of playing on a gaming service where people can't cheat (or at least, not as easily).
Secure from whom? Secure from consumers. Secure from people doing what they want with the hardware they buy. This trend will get worse.
Okay. But just to be clear, you'll be boycotting Sony's and Nintendo's consoles on the same grounds, right?
Please stop buying this product, Slashdotters. Please discourage others from buying it. If people stop buying it, then Microsoft will stop holding the good games hostage and competition will stay alive in the console market.
Oh, I guess not then. Please explain why Microsoft's closed proprietary console is worse for the games industry than Sony's closed proprietary console or Nintendo's closed proprietary console, because I just don't see it.
No, no it doesn't. The GPL restrists rights too. In particular, it prevents me from distributing software to another party under a license of my own choosing. This is most certainly a restriction. It might be one which you are happier with, but it's still a restriction.
The previous poster might be a troll, but he does have a point: the enforcability of the GPL relies on copyright law and is in the same boat in enforcability terms as EULAs for proprietary software. Indeed, the GPL is a EULA, it just has different terms to proprietary ones.
To paraphrase Bruce Schneier, are you suggesting that we make 'interference with a business model' illegal?
Re:Summary of functionality
on
LinuXbox Boots
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· Score: 1
Nice job ignoring his main point, and instead poking at the slipup about being American. I'm British, and last I checked, government policy was broadly similar here and in the rest of Europe too.
Did you have a reply to the meat of the post or not?
I'd strongly disagree with your threading rant. Threads are most certainly a useful concept. A process is necessarily a more heavyweight object than a thread, and multiple threads can be implemented more efficiently than multiple processes. The fact that isn't true on some Unix and Unix-like implementations is a historical quirk, not an instrinsic problem.
Frankly, the whole fork() methodology where you clone the entire state of a process seems pretty warped to me. Sure, it's sometimes a useful thing to do, but it makes a lot less sense if you have a threading implementation that works more efficiently than multiple processes (which should be the case if it's properly designed).
If profiling threaded apps on Linux sucks, the proper response is not to say "but threads are lame anyway". The proper response is to fix threaded profiling, because threading is a perfectly reasonable design choice in many situations and it should be possible to profile those apps.
I think the video is a (very good) fake. If you look closely, you can see an extra thin wire headed from the port on the TV that trails across the floor and along the side of the fridge (in addition to the two power cords). The video is a bit grainy, so it's hard to tell for sure, but that's certainly what it looks like to me.
Another obvious way to fake a video would be to take a development or debug kit, and refit it into a retail box shell (or just paint it black - you wouldn't see the difference on a video).
It's also interesting that none of these mod chips have made their way to the various Linux Xbox projects yet. This also suggests to me that they are fake.
I'm sure it will happen eventually, but my guess is that this isn't it. I'll believe it when I actually see one in person.
Purists will tell you that the tapes have things missing too. I don't know - wasn't ever lucky enough to hear the original broadcasts. However the tapes are more complete than the CDs, and the MP3s have probably been created from the CDs.
Is there a long clip from Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here on the tape? After they arrive at Magrathia (sp?) and exit the ship, Marvin is playing it (together with the line "why is your droid playing Pink Floyd?"), but in the CDs it's cut to ribbons and you only hear the tail end of it - I guess because of the squillions of pounds Floyd would have wanted in licensing fees.
The "bit stuff" is often marketing, especially in the case of game consoles. The problem is how to decide what makes a system x bits long. In the case of, say, the PlayStation 2, the CPU has a basically 32-bit architecture, with 32-bit address bus, and 32-bit standard registers. So maybe it's 32-bit. On the other hand, they have a big fat 2560-bit (sic) data channel to feed the graphics processing. So maybe it's 2560 bit. Or perhaps it's 128- or 256-bit because some internal operations in the graphics/vector unit are done on that many bits at once. Which number you pick is just marketing spin, and doesn't really mean much.
In the case of PC processors, thing are a little more sane, in that we're generally talking an x-bit processor to mean it has x-bit general purpose registers and an x-bit address space. Sometimes these processors use more bits in other places, like wider registers for SIMD operations, or wider data busses. No doubt if the Pentium was used in a game console, it would be described as 64- or 128-bit (hmm...just like the Xbox), to keep up with the marketing spin from the other consoles.
Um nope, try again. Having a monopoly isn't, in itself, illegal. What they were convicted of was illegally leveraging that monopoly to foist other products, like IE, on consumers. I'm merely pointing out that it seems like they didn't really have much power to do that after all, if AOL can easily flip a switch and divert users to whatever browser they choose.
PS. Judging by the excessive bolding and multiple punctuation in your reply, perhaps you need to switch to decaf?
So MS is evil for bundling IE with Windows, forcing people to use it, abusing their monopoly etc. etc. And yet AOL can just flip a switch and suddently a significant chunk of users are using Mozilla. Am I the only one who thinks this points up a significant hole in the anti-trust case?
Maybe they are the lifeblood of the PC industry (although I'm not even sure that's true - the most popular games being things like the Sims, or RTSes like Starcraft, which aren't particularly modded by third parties), but they're certainly not the lifeblood of the console games business. And console games account for the majority of the profits in the industry.
So, maybe a better characterisation would be: "Mods are the lifeblood of some portion of a minority segment of the gaming industry". But I guess that doesn't make such a good headline.
This isn't really true. In Starcraft, for example, every race has reasonable defenses against rush tactics from every other race. Rushing is also a gamble: in scrambling for a rush force, you are neglecting a more orderly buildup, and that could lead you vulnerable if your rush fails.
I've won several Starcraft ladder games against rushing opponents, because I was properly prepared for them. When their rush failed, they were left in a weaker position, which I was able to capitalize on. I tend not to choose rushing as a tactic (unless my initial exploration indicates a vulnerable opponent), because think I'm good at organising large, well developed forces effectively. People who only play rushing games don't get much practise at the strategic and tactical interplay that goes on higher up the tech tree - and often lose when they find themselves in that situation.
It sounds like Microsoft was just being whiny, but think about it like this: Microsoft designed their booth to obey the rules, and didn't have provision for attendees to play the Xboxes hands-on. No doubt they would have wanted to let people play, but they were told up front that they couldn't. Then, they turn up and discover that Sony have ignored the rule completely. In this situation, I think they were perfectly correct to complain.
I'm not sure what this would really prove. I mean, sure, it would be nice to know that a human could decode the signal, but does that show that aliens (if they exist) could do it? For example, it might be obvious to us to try formatting the data as a raster image, but why is this necessarily an obvious thing for an alien to try? It's obvious to us because we're in a culture that transmits 2D images around the place a lot, but is that necessarily a safe assumption about the aliens?
It might not be slanderous, but depending on the terms of your employment contract you might be in breach of a confidentiality agreement for which your employer could legitimately sue.
Slashdot Mirror
Rare's titles have sold an average of around 1.4 million each throughout their history. Let's suppose they manage to do half that in future. Revenue for MS from each Rare title might therefore be around the $14-21M range.
Suppose Rare ship another 5 titles over the lifetime of the Xbox. That's getting up to $100M in revenue. Now factor in the extra bonus of having more quality titles on Xbox - which should increase console sales and therefore revenue for all other games sales. Suddenly, it looks like MS's increased revenue as a result of the purchase might be quite substantial, and the purchase price of $375M looks like not a bad deal at all.
I don't think so, but thanks for asking.
all he said was that MS is acting as though you are gaining something from this 'securing' when really its just securing said box from its owners.
Er no, he said quite a bit more than that. He said that we should all boycott the Xbox because it would somehow be good for competition in the games industry. I just fail to see how. Microsoft imposes restrictions on what you can do with your Xbox - just like Sony does with the PS2 and Nintendo does with the GameCube. Surely the existence of the Xbox adds more competition to the games console business, not less? Or does it only count when other people compete against Microsoft, not the other way around?
My bad...thought this was the same poster. My point still stands though - arguing not to buy from Microsoft in general is a completely different argument to saying "don't buy product X because I can't run software of my choice on it".
Okay, but that's a whole different argument. You're saying that you won't buy products from Microsoft because of their general corporate history. That's all fine and dandy, but it's not really the point you originally seemed to be making. It looked like originally you were arguing that you shouldn't buy Xbox because it was closed and Microsoft were preventing people from modding it and running software of their choosing on it. Which is a pretty weak argument, unless you're prepared to apply to same standard to Sony and Nintendo and boycott their consoles too (which I'm guessing you haven't).
Yes, obviously the major motivation is to cut software piracy, which is a pretty dubious usage of the word 'security'. On the other hand, another motivation is to increase security for online games - if the box isn't hacked, then games can be more secured against cheaters. Personally, I quite like the idea of playing on a gaming service where people can't cheat (or at least, not as easily).
Okay. But just to be clear, you'll be boycotting Sony's and Nintendo's consoles on the same grounds, right?
Please stop buying this product, Slashdotters. Please discourage others from buying it. If people stop buying it, then Microsoft will stop holding the good games hostage and competition will stay alive in the console market.
Oh, I guess not then. Please explain why Microsoft's closed proprietary console is worse for the games industry than Sony's closed proprietary console or Nintendo's closed proprietary console, because I just don't see it.
Call me crazy, but it might also have something to do with IBM having their own proprietary database which they want people to buy.
The previous poster might be a troll, but he does have a point: the enforcability of the GPL relies on copyright law and is in the same boat in enforcability terms as EULAs for proprietary software. Indeed, the GPL is a EULA, it just has different terms to proprietary ones.
To paraphrase Bruce Schneier, are you suggesting that we make 'interference with a business model' illegal?
Nice job ignoring his main point, and instead poking at the slipup about being American. I'm British, and last I checked, government policy was broadly similar here and in the rest of Europe too.
Did you have a reply to the meat of the post or not?
Frankly, the whole fork() methodology where you clone the entire state of a process seems pretty warped to me. Sure, it's sometimes a useful thing to do, but it makes a lot less sense if you have a threading implementation that works more efficiently than multiple processes (which should be the case if it's properly designed).
If profiling threaded apps on Linux sucks, the proper response is not to say "but threads are lame anyway". The proper response is to fix threaded profiling, because threading is a perfectly reasonable design choice in many situations and it should be possible to profile those apps.
That was NFL Fever, not Madden.
I think the video is a (very good) fake. If you look closely, you can see an extra thin wire headed from the port on the TV that trails across the floor and along the side of the fridge (in addition to the two power cords). The video is a bit grainy, so it's hard to tell for sure, but that's certainly what it looks like to me.
Another obvious way to fake a video would be to take a development or debug kit, and refit it into a retail box shell (or just paint it black - you wouldn't see the difference on a video).
It's also interesting that none of these mod chips have made their way to the various Linux Xbox projects yet. This also suggests to me that they are fake.
I'm sure it will happen eventually, but my guess is that this isn't it. I'll believe it when I actually see one in person.
Is there a long clip from Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here on the tape? After they arrive at Magrathia (sp?) and exit the ship, Marvin is playing it (together with the line "why is your droid playing Pink Floyd?"), but in the CDs it's cut to ribbons and you only hear the tail end of it - I guess because of the squillions of pounds Floyd would have wanted in licensing fees.
In the case of PC processors, thing are a little more sane, in that we're generally talking an x-bit processor to mean it has x-bit general purpose registers and an x-bit address space. Sometimes these processors use more bits in other places, like wider registers for SIMD operations, or wider data busses. No doubt if the Pentium was used in a game console, it would be described as 64- or 128-bit (hmm...just like the Xbox), to keep up with the marketing spin from the other consoles.
PS. Judging by the excessive bolding and multiple punctuation in your reply, perhaps you need to switch to decaf?
So MS is evil for bundling IE with Windows, forcing people to use it, abusing their monopoly etc. etc. And yet AOL can just flip a switch and suddently a significant chunk of users are using Mozilla. Am I the only one who thinks this points up a significant hole in the anti-trust case?
So, maybe a better characterisation would be: "Mods are the lifeblood of some portion of a minority segment of the gaming industry". But I guess that doesn't make such a good headline.
Well, okay then, let's substitute ME for 2000. Now we have a big jump from ME to XP, for the same reasons as before.
There is also Kung-Fu Chess.
I've won several Starcraft ladder games against rushing opponents, because I was properly prepared for them. When their rush failed, they were left in a weaker position, which I was able to capitalize on. I tend not to choose rushing as a tactic (unless my initial exploration indicates a vulnerable opponent), because think I'm good at organising large, well developed forces effectively. People who only play rushing games don't get much practise at the strategic and tactical interplay that goes on higher up the tech tree - and often lose when they find themselves in that situation.
It sounds like Microsoft was just being whiny, but think about it like this: Microsoft designed their booth to obey the rules, and didn't have provision for attendees to play the Xboxes hands-on. No doubt they would have wanted to let people play, but they were told up front that they couldn't. Then, they turn up and discover that Sony have ignored the rule completely. In this situation, I think they were perfectly correct to complain.
With the latest Starcraft patch, you can play over UDP on a LAN. No IPX required.
I'm not sure what this would really prove. I mean, sure, it would be nice to know that a human could decode the signal, but does that show that aliens (if they exist) could do it? For example, it might be obvious to us to try formatting the data as a raster image, but why is this necessarily an obvious thing for an alien to try? It's obvious to us because we're in a culture that transmits 2D images around the place a lot, but is that necessarily a safe assumption about the aliens?
It might not be slanderous, but depending on the terms of your employment contract you might be in breach of a confidentiality agreement for which your employer could legitimately sue.