111–120 of 124 posts
They initially officially supported Linux on the Playstation 3, but later decided not only to remove the feature from new models, but reach out through the cloud to remove the feature from existing consoles [1] [2].
This is also the company that put rootkits on CD's [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886509
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otheros
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...
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Well you get a few benefits. > stuck in one configuration This is a massive benefit to development everywhere. Additionally to really being able to push the hardware to the limit. It's a lot easier to learn how to properly "abuse" a single configuration then thousands of different pieces of hardware in millions of different configurations. And just in reliability and testing. You can be sure that your exact hardware,…
> This is a massive benefit to development everywhere. Additionally to really being able to push the hardware to the limit. It's a lot easier to learn how to properly "abuse" a single configuration then thousands of different pieces of hardware in millions of different configurations. This is most obvious near the end of a console's life after developers master the hardware. Compare launch games and final releases fo…
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It does both.
Incorrect, the powerPC may be capable of both, but not the xbox360 in practice.
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What, does MS let game developers choose?
No, the machine always runs big-endian.
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Why sales matter and not profits? If I go and buy Ferrari F360s for $200K then turn around and sell them for $10K I can probably get a lot of sales yet from the business perspective I am going to be in a pretty bad state. Has MS turned in any profit from their whole Xbox affair? There had been various estimates around but I've never seen ones claiming significant profits, the best ones I'd seen claimed it broke even.…
If profit figures were available we wouldn't be having this discussion, because the answer would be obvious. But they're not. Nintendo's figures are the most available (since gaming is the majority of their business and they are a public company), but the least relevant because we know they've been struggling. Sony has had reduced profitability and losses over the last few years. The interesting thing is how difficul…
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First I will note that Sony hardware has reputedly never been easy to develop for, so the PS3 wasn't anything new there. Second, you state while they can drop prices and relax controls, it may be difficult to make their console more powerful . We still don't know how the dice will land in this regard. Microsoft managed higher-than-expected frequency yield, and nobody knows where Sony's chip sits. It also remains to b…
There is no debate about the hardware, really. The PS4 is the more powerful console in every single way. What makes the Xbox One hardware interesting is the Kinect.
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No, the machine always runs big-endian.
All current software does this, but the switching capability means the motherboard could be modified to allow it to run little-endian. This means that if someone wanted to repurpose old Xbox hardware to run a little-endian operating system it would be entirely possible. Certainly not a practical process considering the cheapness of CPUs, but it could make for a fun experiment.
But the point was originally about what the Xbox360 runs, and before that, how it affected development. Not about what the silicon in a particular chip in the 360 has the capability of doing.