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LennonCook · 11-17-2004, 06:54 AM

Warning: Rant..

Ok, sure, it makes sense for Microsoft to try to stop piracy. After all, they exist as a proprietry company and their profit comes from over charging for things (like all other proprietry software distributers). Thus, piracy circumvents their over-pricing and they potentially loose money. So, yes, they need to stop piracy.
But, I still have a problem with this. Because this doesn't just stop someone from playing on XBox live with pirated games. It makes it impossible to improve the XBox in any way. Want more RAM? Want better rendering algorithms? Want to play a Playstation game on it? Sorry, Microsoft don't want that. And why? What is an XBox? Essentially, it is a packaged computer that is specifically optimized for gaming. Get that? It is a computer. The out-of-the-box hardware and software is chosen by Microsoft... and rightfully so (who else would you want to control what goes into a Microsoft packaged system?). But if you want to upgrade your hardware (which is supposedly both possible and easy) to something that suits your needs better, you won't be able to go online with it. To me, this is Microsoft wanting complete control over you. They decide how you use your computer, and what for. The out-of-the-box optimizations should be just that: optimizations. They may be at the expense of other things (because that's the way these things always go), but they should never enforce usage. Buy it from the shop, you can guarantee that it is as it was made by Microsoft, but why should that stay the same?

Just imagine if mainstream PC dealers did this. You would have to buy a completely new computer when all you wanted to do was to add 64MB of RAM, else your modem would refuse to work.
People already make noise about some companies (for example, Dell) "tatooing" their harddrive such that you can't remove the default Operating System from it (so, if you're given Windows 98 and want a full install(non-upgrade) of XP, you can't do it), and that is less prohibitive than the situation in question. So people would complain about this even more. There is very little difference here, except that a console is set up to be optimal for gaming, while a mainstream computer has to be completely average: no expensive optimizations. And why should that affect our freedoms?

11-17-2004, 06:54 AM	#15
LennonCook Jack Burton Join Date: November 10, 2001 Location: Bathurst & Orange, in constant flux Age: 37 Posts: 5,452	Warning: Rant.. Ok, sure, it makes sense for Microsoft to try to stop piracy. After all, they exist as a proprietry company and their profit comes from over charging for things (like all other proprietry software distributers). Thus, piracy circumvents their over-pricing and they potentially loose money. So, yes, they need to stop piracy. But, I still have a problem with this. Because this doesn't just stop someone from playing on XBox live with pirated games. It makes it impossible to improve the XBox in any way. Want more RAM? Want better rendering algorithms? Want to play a Playstation game on it? Sorry, Microsoft don't want that. And why? What is an XBox? Essentially, it is a packaged computer that is specifically optimized for gaming. Get that? It is a computer. The out-of-the-box hardware and software is chosen by Microsoft... and rightfully so (who else would you want to control what goes into a Microsoft packaged system?). But if you want to upgrade your hardware (which is supposedly both possible and easy) to something that suits your needs better, you won't be able to go online with it. To me, this is Microsoft wanting complete control over you. They decide how you use your computer, and what for. The out-of-the-box optimizations should be just that: optimizations. They may be at the expense of other things (because that's the way these things always go), but they should never enforce usage. Buy it from the shop, you can guarantee that it is as it was made by Microsoft, but why should that stay the same? Just imagine if mainstream PC dealers did this. You would have to buy a completely new computer when all you wanted to do was to add 64MB of RAM, else your modem would refuse to work. People already make noise about some companies (for example, Dell) "tatooing" their harddrive such that you can't remove the default Operating System from it (so, if you're given Windows 98 and want a full install(non-upgrade) of XP, you can't do it), and that is less prohibitive than the situation in question. So people would complain about this even more. There is very little difference here, except that a console is set up to be optimal for gaming, while a mainstream computer has to be completely average: no expensive optimizations. And why should that affect our freedoms?