How different was it really? It's a very much "on rails" RPG (in terms of where you are allowed to walk within the maps), that has obnoxious loading times, tiny maps, and is generally too short. The quest structure, with the retries and 'boasts' also serves to always remind you that you're playing a game, not immersed in a world.
The only innovation was the level of customization and character development. But even that wasn't a revolutionary new idea, it was just dialing up an existing concept.
Granted, the production values were high, and the overall level of polish was good. It's a competent enough RPG, but let's not pretend that it was anything really special.
Frankly, there are several better RPGs out there, both on Xbox and other platforms. Judging by Gamerankings, others agree with me (Fable is currently around 86%, whereas other RPGs have scored far higher).
Cheney described it as irrefutable evidence of a nuclear program. But he knew, at the time he made that statement, that the most likely use was for rockets, not a centrifuge. So he knew this wasn't 'slam-dunk' irrefutable evidence, and yet that's what he told the American people. That sounds like a lie to me.
If he'd said "we think they might be used for an enrichment centrifuge" he'd have been fine, but he gave the impression to the American people that he was absolutely certain, beyond any doubt, that Iraq had a nuclear program.
The key about this is that up until now, the administration has been able to say "well, guess we had bad intelligence" to explain away the missing WMDs. Now we know that actually they had pretty good intelligence, they just chose to lie about it.
Okay, this is standard bullshit technique. Molyneux probably has no fucking clue how much processor time the growing trees feature would take. Mostly likely because, in all probability, it was never really implemented. However, by making up a specific number to tell people, he is able to give the impression that the feature was a lot further developed than it really was. If he just says "it would have been expensive", then that's not very impressive, whereas if he says "15% of CPU" that sounds a lot more convincing. Specific numbers, even if they're totally made up, just sound cooler.
Remember also that "in development", when referring to a feature, need not necessarily mean programmers writing actual code. It could just mean that the idea came up in conversation one day - they're "developing" the idea, see.
Bottom line: Molyneux is a good, but not great, game designer. But he's a PR genius.
Yes, but you don't bolt on your physics engine late in development, because physics affects so much of the gameplay. It needs to be integrated with the rest of your engine. Game and level design needs to take it into account.
But doesn't the system disenfranchise a large number of voters?
Suppose I'm a Democrat and I live in Texas, or I'm a Republican and I live in New York. In either case, my vote is worthless, and my voice isn't heard.
It seems to me that the fairest system is just to go to a straight popular vote. One person, one vote. Why should the value of my vote vary depending on what state I live in?
It doesn't matter what units, because the equation is dimensionally correct. Let me give you an example:
If your units of distance and time are meters and seconds. Let's suppose that we have a speed of 10 m/s, and an age of 10 seconds. We divide one by the other, and get an acceleration of 1m/s^2.
Now suppose our units are kilometers and, say, blocks of 5 seconds - call them 'ticks'. The same speed as before, measured in the new units is 0.05 km/t. The same time as before, measured in the new units is 2 ticks. Divide one by the other, and we get 0.025 km/t^2.
Now translate back 0.025 km/t^2 into the first unit scheme. 0.025 km/t^2 = 25 m/t^2 = 1 m/s^2.
Tada! The result is the same. You can do the same trick no matter what units you choose. You can do it furlongs per fortnight if you like.
In other words, the value of the critical acceleration suggested by MOND, the speed of light divided by the age of the universe, is completely independent of the units you choose to measure those values.
Whether the continuum hypothesis is true or false depends on your choice of axioms. I'm not sure what your statement about "if it is true, then it can't be proved true" means. If you accept the axiom of choice, then the continuum hypothesis is true, if you accept its negation then it isn't - simple as that, really.
It has been shown that with the standard set of axioms (without the 'axiom of choice'), you can construct models where the continuum hypothesis is either true or false, at your option.
If you incorporate the axiom of choice, then the continuum hypothesis is true.
If you incorporate the negation of the axiom of choice, then the continuum hypothesis is false.
For reference, the axiom of choice simply states that given a set of non-empty sets, it is possible to form another set consisting of one element from each set. Put another way, if I have several boxes, each box containing at least one item, then it is possible to take one item from each box.
When considering finite collections of sets (or even countably finite collection of sets), the statement is trivially true. When you allow uncountable collections of uncountable sets, things get...weird.
For example, if you allow the full form of the axiom of choice, then you can prove things like the Banach-Tarsky paradox, which basically says that you can cut the unit (solid) sphere up into finitely many pieces, and reassemble those pieces using only translation and rotation to form two spheres identical to the original. This is pretty fucked up, which is why the axiom of choice is considered a questionable one.
For an easier to grasp example, consider the set of all non-empty subsets of the reals. The axiom of choice says I can choose an element from each of those subsets. But how do I do that? What procedure do I use? At first you might say, pick the lowest or highest element, but what about those subsets unbounded at one end. Or the element closest to zero - but what about open sets where the infimum or supremum isn't in the set? It's really tricky to come up with a choice procedure, however complex, that works for all cases. After a while of playing with examples, you wonder if perhaps it's not possible.
Personally, I think the axiom of choice is a bad axiom. Choosing one thing from each set sounds like a sort of 'counting' operation to me, and yet the axiom of choice is saying that it's okay to do that even with uncountable collections of things. It's trying to crowbar the uncountable to behave like the countable. If you do that, thinks break.
So, from an intuitive point of view, where we don't like to have things like the Banach-Tarsky paradox, we could say that the axiom of choice is 'bad', and therefore that we prefer to believe its negation, and hence that the continuum hypothesis is false. A strict Platonist would probably take that point of view.
In support of this viewpoint is also the consideration of where axioms come from in the first place. They are things that we hold to be 'self evidently' true. For example, if A implies B and B implies C, then we can deduce by applying the transitive axiom that A implies C. That seems self evident, but to be rigorous we state it as an axiom. To me the axiom of choice just doesn't meet the 'smell test' for a self-evident axiom, but that's only an opinion.
If you're not a strict Platonist, then you might not believe that. Instead you might believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and that truth itself is a logical abstract and that one can only rationally ask about the truth or falsity of a statement in respect to a set of self-consistent axioms which can choose freely.
There are no "DirectX royalties". It's just like any other Windows API.
The only downside to using DirectX (which comes with a very mature SDK, samples, docs, and helper libraries these days) would be if you cared about porting to non-Microsoft platforms. This is, of course, a real consideration for some, but certainly not for all.
Velocity is an observed phenomenum. It's not an absolute, but is measured by an observer in some frame of reference. And, in this case, the velocity of the photons is observed to be influenced by the gravitational field.
The same applies to any object falling under gravity. Would you say that if you fell from a 5 storey building that your velocity wasn't changing? Because it sure as hell would feel like it.
Right. And even without gravity or other acceleration, the observed wavelength of a photon is dependent on your frame of reference due to the Doppler effect.
Photons are accelerated by the influence of gravity, but you need to be careful with your definition of 'accelerated'.
Acceleration is a change in velocity. Remember that velocity is a vector. So if something changes its direction of travel it is accelerating, even if its speed (i.e. the magnitude of its velocity) stays the same.
Photons do not change their speed under gravitational influence, but they do change their velocity because their paths are deflected and they change direction.
In Einstein's theory, gravity is a warping of the shape of space-time itself caused by massive objects. Photons follow 'geodesic' paths in space-time. (Geodesic paths minimize distance.) If space-time is flat, the geodesics are straight lines. If space-time is curved, so are the geodesics. So, in the presence of massive objects, photons follow curved paths, which correspond with their being influenced by gravity.
For a more mundane example of a geodesic, consider the shortest route between two points on some surface. On a flat table, such a route is a straight line. On the surface of a sphere, such a route is a curved arc.
If you're referring to the/GS compiler switch, then it's pretty well defined: you trash the stack, your process dies. Ugly, but better than letting malware inject code via buffer overflow exploits.
Yes, this isn't a substitute for fixing overflow bugs in first place, but the point is that in a large codebase inevitably there will be some that get missed - so having some additional defense-in-depth is a good idea.
Re:Pronounced with a short "I"
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The British pronunciation is most definitely like 'prime' or 'private', whatever M-W has to say on the subject.
I also note that the audio clip on the site is spoken by an American, and pronounced the other way (i.e. closer to the French 'prime').
Because Microsoft exercises monopoly power in a particular market - viz. the market for desktop PC operating systems. Monopoly power means that they can pretty much set any terms they like for sale, and not have it affect their volume. You don't need 100% share to exercise monopoly power.
With EA and Renderware, I would say that Renderware is not sufficiently important for them to be able to exercise monopoly power with it. There are competitors. If EA put up their prices or reduced the functionality, games companies have other reasonable options. Indeed, the majority of games on the market are built without Renderware. Many use other pieces of middleware (e.g. Unreal Engine), and still others don't significantly use middleware at all.
I know it's the standard kneejerk Slashdot reaction whenever a big company buys something, but really, I don't see a potential anti-trust issue here at all.
Unless they are a monopoly, which they aren't, this would be perfectly legal.
Having an internal version of a tool which is more advanced than the version you license externally is a perfectly legal business practice. It doesn't even strike me as particularly unfair.
With only a few exceptions, businesses do not legally have to sell their products on equal terms to all customers, nor do they have to make available all the technology and services they use internally. And, quite frankly, why the hell should they? They're paying for the development (or bought the company that paid for the development), it's entirely up to them what they do with the fruits of that investment. If they want to license some portions externally to recoup some costs, while retaining other portions as a competitive advangtage, they should be perfectly free to do so. And, under the law, they are.
The situation changes if they have a monopoly in a particular market. Then there are anti-trust provisions which come into effect. But without a monopoly, none of those considerations is relevant.
I'm not sure what you mean by the phrase "monopolistic behaviour". I would assume it to mean "doing stuff that you could only get away with if you were a monopoly", but EA isn't a monopoly in the games business, and Renderware doesn't have a monopoly of the games middleware business, so pretty much by definition I don't see how anything EA chooses to do with Renderware could be considered "monopolistic".
2. Annoying advertising clause that says if you want to rebrand the code you must get permission from Microsoft. In other words, you can't fork the code under a different name. (section 2.2)
So it's more BSD-like then, big deal.
3. Overall reading seems to indicate that you must accept the license in order to USE the software, even though you did not sign anything. This is directly in opposition to the GPL.
Why is that different to the GPL? They're both licences that apply to the use of software. Without a license, you can't legally use any non-public domain software. The GPL is one such license, this is another.
4. The focus of the document is how you have the "right" to use their "patented" code. If this doesn't throw up red flags, nothing does. This means they can withdraw the license at any time, since it is more of a contract to use patented software than it is a license to distribute.
Newsflash: licences are contracts. The GPL is a contract. Of course this one reads like a contract to use patented software - what else would you expect it to be?
5. The clause in section 2.4 "Defensive Suspension" gives Microsoft broad discression to "terminate all license grants" if _they_ are sued in any way regarding the technology. This means, "sue us over the restrictions and we can instantly take away your right to use it, and thus your right to transfer email". It guarantees a bullet proof monopoly on the Patented technology.
Isn't that more of a self-defence clause in case people find bugs and want to sue Microsoft about it?
And yes, there are plenty of other things that are at odds with the GPL
Big deal. Why does everything have to be GPL compatible? What would be wrong with, say, a BSD-style license for this particular application?
Well, now we know why they're interested in going after spammers. To make some quick money - the reduction of spam that may result is just a small side benefit.
Riiiight, because we all know that Microsoft has a cash crisis and needs every dime they can get. Why, that $60B they have in the bank is barely enough to meet payroll...for the next centuary.
The problem is, the developer is given the choice of agreeing to use Live (along with the limitations, delays and expense- and, ok, to be fair, as well as non-essential perks like buddy lists and unified ID's, etc- that entails) or not including an online component in their game at all. I can understand why MS would want to maintain a stranglehold on this market, but success in the console market has to involve making third parties' lives easier. You didn't see Sony contractually barring developers from exploiting any of the functionality of the Playstation.
What "limitations, delays and expense"? I don't really see what Xbox Live bars you from doing, it just sets a minimum standard, and you are allowed to add more stuff if you choose. Expense, when compared to the entire cost of a project, is pretty minimal, and you get good bang-for-the-buck out of leveraging the Xbox SDK to do most of the grunt work.
Then you have to remember that for any developer who is a console developer, rather than a PC developer, online is all new to them. They don't have any existing code to leverage. At least with Xbox there is a well-defined service with a fully-supported API to make it easy to get all the basics up and running. With Sony, they are completely on their own. For those developers, Xbox Live probably makes things cheaper.
Sony went with a different model, but I would note that it hasn't really proved any more successful for them. They have sold roughly 1.5M network adapters, compared with Xbox Live's figure of just under 1M, but when you compare the relative install bases of the parent platforms it seems to me that if Sony's approach were really superior they should be putting up much bigger numbers than that.
Where are the MMO games? The online games in more experimental genres?
The lack of MMO games is indeed a little bit embarrasing for Microsoft, but I doubt that has anything to do with Live per se. I think it has to do with the economics of MMO games being pretty dicey (look at all the PC MMOs that have been cancelled recently), and Xbox not having a large enough installed base for the business case to look good enough.
Nonsense, as easily shown by readily observable facts. On every other platform (most notably the PC), there is no nanny-state platform vendor-controlled online gaming infrastructure. And yet there are thousands of perfectly successful and functional online games.
Except that Xbox Live titles offer a more consistent level of functionality. Unified sign-in and a friends list that you can share from title-to-title makes sense. The ability to invite friends to play games cross-title (i.e. I can invite you to play a game with me, even if you're currently playing a different one). Ubiquitous voice support, built-in. All of this is functionality provided by Xbox Live that allows for a consistent and high quality user-experience.
"Hey! Why not add loads of time and expense to your project tearing down your own network code and sellotaping in ours, and in return, we (Microsoft) will get extra revenue from XBL subscribers! Wait, where are you going?"
Except that it's not like that at all. Xbox Live is used for matchmaking, and most of the work is in front-end UI, which you're probably rebuilding for the console anyway. In fact the Xbox SDK makes it quite easy to include this stuff (much easier than building from scratch). It means that game developers can focus on the game (where the network code is exactly the same), and not worry about launching and friends lists, and invitations, and voice, and so forth.
I believe that Microsoft has done exactly the right thing in enforcing a high bar, and making sure that features like cross-game invitations and friends list work across all Live titles. The result is a much better experience for end-users.
See above. Every Xbox is technically capable of connecting to the internet out of the box. XBL prevents this. The real question is why aren't 90% of Xboxes being used for online play?
I would hazard that it's because most people don't have an Internet connection in their living room because that's not where their PC is. So that means running cable from another room, or setting up wireless. Both of which require effort, money, and a moderate amount of expertise. I would argue that the requirement to do that, and not any problem with Live, is the real blocking factor.
Intel's server class processors are called Xeon not Xenon.
Why would 2 or 4 cores be more logical than 3? I mean, I know it feels like it should be a power of two, but I honestly can't think of a good technical reason why 3 isn't just as rational a choice. Doesn't it just come down to a tradeoff between how much power you want, what you can put on a die, and how much it will cost? Maybe 3 is the number that pops out when you optimize for whatever they wanted to optimize for?
The L2 cache thing does seem weird. It's either a garbled or badly worded document, a truly strange design decision, or simply evidence that this whole thing was just fantasy and aren't the real specs at all.
Memory might be cheap, but when you're into a mass market device even cheap components add up.
Let's say Microsoft aim to have a PS2 level of success, and sell 50 million of these things. And let's suppose that they throw in an extra $20 worth of RAM into each box. Boom, that's one billion dollars right there. Who picks up the tab for that?
Do they pass it on to customers, driving the price of the console up? Do they up the royalties they charge for each game? Do they just eat the cost? All of those are possible, but they all have obvious downsides. Which is not to say that they might not be good ideas on balance, but just to point out that it's not as easy as saying "throw a gig of RAM in the box".
Of course, this is all pure speculation, because we don't know what the specs for the thing will be, and it's entirely likely that this "leak" is just fanboy ramblings. Maybe they will just "throw a gig of RAM in the box"?
Slashdot Mirror
How different was it really? It's a very much "on rails" RPG (in terms of where you are allowed to walk within the maps), that has obnoxious loading times, tiny maps, and is generally too short. The quest structure, with the retries and 'boasts' also serves to always remind you that you're playing a game, not immersed in a world.
The only innovation was the level of customization and character development. But even that wasn't a revolutionary new idea, it was just dialing up an existing concept.
Granted, the production values were high, and the overall level of polish was good. It's a competent enough RPG, but let's not pretend that it was anything really special.
Frankly, there are several better RPGs out there, both on Xbox and other platforms. Judging by Gamerankings, others agree with me (Fable is currently around 86%, whereas other RPGs have scored far higher).
If he'd said "we think they might be used for an enrichment centrifuge" he'd have been fine, but he gave the impression to the American people that he was absolutely certain, beyond any doubt, that Iraq had a nuclear program.
The key about this is that up until now, the administration has been able to say "well, guess we had bad intelligence" to explain away the missing WMDs. Now we know that actually they had pretty good intelligence, they just chose to lie about it.
Remember also that "in development", when referring to a feature, need not necessarily mean programmers writing actual code. It could just mean that the idea came up in conversation one day - they're "developing" the idea, see.
Bottom line: Molyneux is a good, but not great, game designer. But he's a PR genius.
Yes, but you don't bolt on your physics engine late in development, because physics affects so much of the gameplay. It needs to be integrated with the rest of your engine. Game and level design needs to take it into account.
But doesn't the system disenfranchise a large number of voters?
Suppose I'm a Democrat and I live in Texas, or I'm a Republican and I live in New York. In either case, my vote is worthless, and my voice isn't heard.
It seems to me that the fairest system is just to go to a straight popular vote. One person, one vote. Why should the value of my vote vary depending on what state I live in?
It doesn't matter what units, because the equation is dimensionally correct. Let me give you an example:
If your units of distance and time are meters and seconds. Let's suppose that we have a speed of 10 m/s, and an age of 10 seconds. We divide one by the other, and get an acceleration of 1m/s^2.
Now suppose our units are kilometers and, say, blocks of 5 seconds - call them 'ticks'. The same speed as before, measured in the new units is 0.05 km/t. The same time as before, measured in the new units is 2 ticks. Divide one by the other, and we get 0.025 km/t^2.
Now translate back 0.025 km/t^2 into the first unit scheme. 0.025 km/t^2 = 25 m/t^2 = 1 m/s^2.
Tada! The result is the same. You can do the same trick no matter what units you choose. You can do it furlongs per fortnight if you like.
In other words, the value of the critical acceleration suggested by MOND, the speed of light divided by the age of the universe, is completely independent of the units you choose to measure those values.
Whether the continuum hypothesis is true or false depends on your choice of axioms. I'm not sure what your statement about "if it is true, then it can't be proved true" means. If you accept the axiom of choice, then the continuum hypothesis is true, if you accept its negation then it isn't - simple as that, really.
It has been shown that with the standard set of axioms (without the 'axiom of choice'), you can construct models where the continuum hypothesis is either true or false, at your option.
If you incorporate the axiom of choice, then the continuum hypothesis is true.
If you incorporate the negation of the axiom of choice, then the continuum hypothesis is false.
For reference, the axiom of choice simply states that given a set of non-empty sets, it is possible to form another set consisting of one element from each set. Put another way, if I have several boxes, each box containing at least one item, then it is possible to take one item from each box.
When considering finite collections of sets (or even countably finite collection of sets), the statement is trivially true. When you allow uncountable collections of uncountable sets, things get...weird.
For example, if you allow the full form of the axiom of choice, then you can prove things like the Banach-Tarsky paradox, which basically says that you can cut the unit (solid) sphere up into finitely many pieces, and reassemble those pieces using only translation and rotation to form two spheres identical to the original. This is pretty fucked up, which is why the axiom of choice is considered a questionable one.
For an easier to grasp example, consider the set of all non-empty subsets of the reals. The axiom of choice says I can choose an element from each of those subsets. But how do I do that? What procedure do I use? At first you might say, pick the lowest or highest element, but what about those subsets unbounded at one end. Or the element closest to zero - but what about open sets where the infimum or supremum isn't in the set? It's really tricky to come up with a choice procedure, however complex, that works for all cases. After a while of playing with examples, you wonder if perhaps it's not possible.
Personally, I think the axiom of choice is a bad axiom. Choosing one thing from each set sounds like a sort of 'counting' operation to me, and yet the axiom of choice is saying that it's okay to do that even with uncountable collections of things. It's trying to crowbar the uncountable to behave like the countable. If you do that, thinks break.
So, from an intuitive point of view, where we don't like to have things like the Banach-Tarsky paradox, we could say that the axiom of choice is 'bad', and therefore that we prefer to believe its negation, and hence that the continuum hypothesis is false. A strict Platonist would probably take that point of view.
In support of this viewpoint is also the consideration of where axioms come from in the first place. They are things that we hold to be 'self evidently' true. For example, if A implies B and B implies C, then we can deduce by applying the transitive axiom that A implies C. That seems self evident, but to be rigorous we state it as an axiom. To me the axiom of choice just doesn't meet the 'smell test' for a self-evident axiom, but that's only an opinion.
If you're not a strict Platonist, then you might not believe that. Instead you might believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and that truth itself is a logical abstract and that one can only rationally ask about the truth or falsity of a statement in respect to a set of self-consistent axioms which can choose freely.
There are no "DirectX royalties". It's just like any other Windows API.
The only downside to using DirectX (which comes with a very mature SDK, samples, docs, and helper libraries these days) would be if you cared about porting to non-Microsoft platforms. This is, of course, a real consideration for some, but certainly not for all.
Velocity is an observed phenomenum. It's not an absolute, but is measured by an observer in some frame of reference. And, in this case, the velocity of the photons is observed to be influenced by the gravitational field.
The same applies to any object falling under gravity. Would you say that if you fell from a 5 storey building that your velocity wasn't changing? Because it sure as hell would feel like it.
Right. And even without gravity or other acceleration, the observed wavelength of a photon is dependent on your frame of reference due to the Doppler effect.
Photons are accelerated by the influence of gravity, but you need to be careful with your definition of 'accelerated'.
Acceleration is a change in velocity. Remember that velocity is a vector. So if something changes its direction of travel it is accelerating, even if its speed (i.e. the magnitude of its velocity) stays the same.
Photons do not change their speed under gravitational influence, but they do change their velocity because their paths are deflected and they change direction.
In Einstein's theory, gravity is a warping of the shape of space-time itself caused by massive objects. Photons follow 'geodesic' paths in space-time. (Geodesic paths minimize distance.) If space-time is flat, the geodesics are straight lines. If space-time is curved, so are the geodesics. So, in the presence of massive objects, photons follow curved paths, which correspond with their being influenced by gravity.
For a more mundane example of a geodesic, consider the shortest route between two points on some surface. On a flat table, such a route is a straight line. On the surface of a sphere, such a route is a curved arc.
If you're referring to the /GS compiler switch, then it's pretty well defined: you trash the stack, your process dies. Ugly, but better than letting malware inject code via buffer overflow exploits.
Yes, this isn't a substitute for fixing overflow bugs in first place, but the point is that in a large codebase inevitably there will be some that get missed - so having some additional defense-in-depth is a good idea.
The British pronunciation is most definitely like 'prime' or 'private', whatever M-W has to say on the subject.
I also note that the audio clip on the site is spoken by an American, and pronounced the other way (i.e. closer to the French 'prime').
Because Microsoft exercises monopoly power in a particular market - viz. the market for desktop PC operating systems. Monopoly power means that they can pretty much set any terms they like for sale, and not have it affect their volume. You don't need 100% share to exercise monopoly power.
With EA and Renderware, I would say that Renderware is not sufficiently important for them to be able to exercise monopoly power with it. There are competitors. If EA put up their prices or reduced the functionality, games companies have other reasonable options. Indeed, the majority of games on the market are built without Renderware. Many use other pieces of middleware (e.g. Unreal Engine), and still others don't significantly use middleware at all.
I know it's the standard kneejerk Slashdot reaction whenever a big company buys something, but really, I don't see a potential anti-trust issue here at all.
(Of course, IANAL, just a game developer.)
Unless they are a monopoly, which they aren't, this would be perfectly legal.
Having an internal version of a tool which is more advanced than the version you license externally is a perfectly legal business practice. It doesn't even strike me as particularly unfair.
With only a few exceptions, businesses do not legally have to sell their products on equal terms to all customers, nor do they have to make available all the technology and services they use internally. And, quite frankly, why the hell should they? They're paying for the development (or bought the company that paid for the development), it's entirely up to them what they do with the fruits of that investment. If they want to license some portions externally to recoup some costs, while retaining other portions as a competitive advangtage, they should be perfectly free to do so. And, under the law, they are.
The situation changes if they have a monopoly in a particular market. Then there are anti-trust provisions which come into effect. But without a monopoly, none of those considerations is relevant.
I'm not sure what you mean by the phrase "monopolistic behaviour". I would assume it to mean "doing stuff that you could only get away with if you were a monopoly", but EA isn't a monopoly in the games business, and Renderware doesn't have a monopoly of the games middleware business, so pretty much by definition I don't see how anything EA chooses to do with Renderware could be considered "monopolistic".
Why would it be anti-trust? Renderware is not a monopoly on gaming middleware.
So it's more BSD-like then, big deal.
3. Overall reading seems to indicate that you must accept the license in order to USE the software, even though you did not sign anything. This is directly in opposition to the GPL.
Why is that different to the GPL? They're both licences that apply to the use of software. Without a license, you can't legally use any non-public domain software. The GPL is one such license, this is another.
4. The focus of the document is how you have the "right" to use their "patented" code. If this doesn't throw up red flags, nothing does. This means they can withdraw the license at any time, since it is more of a contract to use patented software than it is a license to distribute.
Newsflash: licences are contracts. The GPL is a contract. Of course this one reads like a contract to use patented software - what else would you expect it to be?
5. The clause in section 2.4 "Defensive Suspension" gives Microsoft broad discression to "terminate all license grants" if _they_ are sued in any way regarding the technology. This means, "sue us over the restrictions and we can instantly take away your right to use it, and thus your right to transfer email". It guarantees a bullet proof monopoly on the Patented technology.
Isn't that more of a self-defence clause in case people find bugs and want to sue Microsoft about it?
And yes, there are plenty of other things that are at odds with the GPL
Big deal. Why does everything have to be GPL compatible? What would be wrong with, say, a BSD-style license for this particular application?
Riiiight, because we all know that Microsoft has a cash crisis and needs every dime they can get. Why, that $60B they have in the bank is barely enough to meet payroll...for the next centuary.
What "limitations, delays and expense"? I don't really see what Xbox Live bars you from doing, it just sets a minimum standard, and you are allowed to add more stuff if you choose. Expense, when compared to the entire cost of a project, is pretty minimal, and you get good bang-for-the-buck out of leveraging the Xbox SDK to do most of the grunt work.
Then you have to remember that for any developer who is a console developer, rather than a PC developer, online is all new to them. They don't have any existing code to leverage. At least with Xbox there is a well-defined service with a fully-supported API to make it easy to get all the basics up and running. With Sony, they are completely on their own. For those developers, Xbox Live probably makes things cheaper.
Sony went with a different model, but I would note that it hasn't really proved any more successful for them. They have sold roughly 1.5M network adapters, compared with Xbox Live's figure of just under 1M, but when you compare the relative install bases of the parent platforms it seems to me that if Sony's approach were really superior they should be putting up much bigger numbers than that.
Where are the MMO games? The online games in more experimental genres?
The lack of MMO games is indeed a little bit embarrasing for Microsoft, but I doubt that has anything to do with Live per se. I think it has to do with the economics of MMO games being pretty dicey (look at all the PC MMOs that have been cancelled recently), and Xbox not having a large enough installed base for the business case to look good enough.
Except that Xbox Live titles offer a more consistent level of functionality. Unified sign-in and a friends list that you can share from title-to-title makes sense. The ability to invite friends to play games cross-title (i.e. I can invite you to play a game with me, even if you're currently playing a different one). Ubiquitous voice support, built-in. All of this is functionality provided by Xbox Live that allows for a consistent and high quality user-experience.
"Hey! Why not add loads of time and expense to your project tearing down your own network code and sellotaping in ours, and in return, we (Microsoft) will get extra revenue from XBL subscribers! Wait, where are you going?"
Except that it's not like that at all. Xbox Live is used for matchmaking, and most of the work is in front-end UI, which you're probably rebuilding for the console anyway. In fact the Xbox SDK makes it quite easy to include this stuff (much easier than building from scratch). It means that game developers can focus on the game (where the network code is exactly the same), and not worry about launching and friends lists, and invitations, and voice, and so forth.
I believe that Microsoft has done exactly the right thing in enforcing a high bar, and making sure that features like cross-game invitations and friends list work across all Live titles. The result is a much better experience for end-users.
See above. Every Xbox is technically capable of connecting to the internet out of the box. XBL prevents this. The real question is why aren't 90% of Xboxes being used for online play?
I would hazard that it's because most people don't have an Internet connection in their living room because that's not where their PC is. So that means running cable from another room, or setting up wireless. Both of which require effort, money, and a moderate amount of expertise. I would argue that the requirement to do that, and not any problem with Live, is the real blocking factor.
You not only read, but actually post on Slashdot. And you think you are a "normal user"? I suspect you need to recalibrate your idea of normalcy.
Intel's server class processors are called Xeon not Xenon.
Why would 2 or 4 cores be more logical than 3? I mean, I know it feels like it should be a power of two, but I honestly can't think of a good technical reason why 3 isn't just as rational a choice. Doesn't it just come down to a tradeoff between how much power you want, what you can put on a die, and how much it will cost? Maybe 3 is the number that pops out when you optimize for whatever they wanted to optimize for?
The L2 cache thing does seem weird. It's either a garbled or badly worded document, a truly strange design decision, or simply evidence that this whole thing was just fantasy and aren't the real specs at all.
Memory might be cheap, but when you're into a mass market device even cheap components add up.
Let's say Microsoft aim to have a PS2 level of success, and sell 50 million of these things. And let's suppose that they throw in an extra $20 worth of RAM into each box. Boom, that's one billion dollars right there. Who picks up the tab for that?
Do they pass it on to customers, driving the price of the console up? Do they up the royalties they charge for each game? Do they just eat the cost? All of those are possible, but they all have obvious downsides. Which is not to say that they might not be good ideas on balance, but just to point out that it's not as easy as saying "throw a gig of RAM in the box".
Of course, this is all pure speculation, because we don't know what the specs for the thing will be, and it's entirely likely that this "leak" is just fanboy ramblings. Maybe they will just "throw a gig of RAM in the box"?
"Scarecrow, I can't give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma!" - The Great Oz.