natbro

Tools, and instructions for more easily installing and launching Windows games via Wine or CrossOver directly in the macOS Steam client. Rough edges abound.

ever heard of ActiveX? you know, arbitrary code installing and running in your browser and available to be scripted by javascript? sorry. I'm not solely responsible, there were many of us. but still sorry, pretty responsible. we were young. code-signing as a means of validating origin was a great idea. it needed additional infrastructure to keep track of originators and to prevent abuse, though, and that wasn't perfectly thought through or executed. live and learn.

ever heard of ActiveX? you know, arbitrary code installing and running in your browser on Windows and available to be scripted by javascript? like, instead of Java? sorry. I'm not solely responsible, but sorry, pretty responsible. we were young. code-signing as a means of validating origin was a great idea. though it needed additional infrastructure to prevent abuse and allow global revocation, and that wasn't perfectly thought through or executed. live and learn. :grinning-emoji:

yes, it would have to be a new Apple-TV with at least some more local storage. the current models have 8GB, I think. tweaking that up to 128GB or 256GB would open up a lot of possibilities without making a $199 price-point impossible. but hey, what do i know.

i'm honestly not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. if you are: heh, good one. if you're not: there's nothing wrong with putting some of your wood behind encouraging casual gaming and expanding your market, but putting ALL of your wood behind it? what else did they get accomplished in this time period? not enough other things if you take a look at how many people and how much money was being spent on R&D in that division.

Well put, and although I may be somewhat biased, I agree -- financial muscle only gave us the ability to get on the field, it doesn't help you win or have a long-term strategy. The original hardware profile (PC-like so tools were available) and including a HDD was what allowed us to get game developers on-board quickly. Including the HDD and the NIC were also the bets, and as I tried to say in my original post, these were the innovations and the bets on the living-room Trojan horse -- we could afford to include these things because the console business model involved an audience size, a higher bill-of-material and a payback model which things like set-top-boxes and WebTV did not. Securing a few awesome first- and second-/third-party games exclusively to the console was also a critical tactic early on. I remain somewhat surprised that outside Halo there are no longer standout exclusive titles. I don't know why that effort has been dropped, that's stupid, too.

See InclinePlane's comment, above - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5210998. (s)he said it better than I was trying to.

Thank you for the thoughtful and spot-on response. I completely agree. My draft was nowhere near as well-put, I have discarded it post-haste.

I honestly don't know if Apple will enter this market, but I'm not quite as pessimistic as you are about the profit margin as the reason not to.

I think they could build a next-generation-console-capable Apple-TV and sell it at or below $199 while keeping their 40% margin. They would sell you each additional wireless controller (and it would be sweetly designed, I suspect) for the standard $79 peripheral cost.

The primary contributor to their bill-of-material cost savings vs. competitors is that they already own and/or license at huge volume their CPU and GPU cores and know how to fabricate them in multi-core formats with high-speed cross-connectivity. They can also buy RAM and flash for SSD storage at better costs than anybody else. These are the primary cost drivers (basically money flowing to IBM, nVidia, etc for CPU/GPU and money flowing elsewhere for RAM/SSD/HDD) for xBox, PS, Wii.

Apple would have dramatically lower overall startup costs versus the original xBox/xBox360 and PS2/3 given they already have a toolchain and SMP operating system with sandboxing, an App Store and its back-end, user-accounts and payment infrastructure, and numerous other costs shared with the rest of the Mac and iOS ecosystems.

Apple wouldn't have a lot of work to do to train developers: tell us the screen resolution, how to interact with the controller and any other new hardware capabilities, tell us anything special about the GPU's and let us go to town with the existing toolchain we are using for iPhone and iPad.

So, again, I have no idea if they'll do it, I just think it would be a very profitable business for them.

I'm sorry I didn't mention Valve's steam as a competitor in the post, I am very very excited to see what they come up with. I <3 Valve. I do think Apple and Android have a little more indie developer momentum right now, but not sure how that will play out long-term.

The dawning horror for the console vendors is that the change is already happening around them and on every iPhone, iPad, Samsung, Android, etc device. These already have digital-only distribution. These already have very high-quality GPU's that push almost as many triangles as an xBox 360 or PS3, and are on a faster product-iteration-cycle. Some of these - iPad3 and Samsung Galaxy Tab's - already have higher-resolution screens than your 60" HDTV and many people are using them more hours per day and spending more dollars per device than they ever did on consoles. Yikes, if I were still in the console biz, I would push like hell to move a little faster than updating hardware every 7-8 years and doing poorly with software.

i personally think you'd also need a really good/new controller, but fundamentally i agree. i would develop for such a console in a heart.beat.

you're spot on, they shouldn't really cost anything. XCode for iOS development, for example, doesn't cost anything (once you've bought a mac). similarly Android development tools don't cost a thing. charging a small fee like $99/year for the apple developer program or the Amazon store, or $25/year (i think it is) for Google Play is something they say simply helps defray the costs of hosting your apps and icons and in-app-purchase stuff, etc, reviewing apps, supporting you as a developer, and they all say it "helps improve the quality of apps in the store." To be fair, Windows development tools and access to the Windows Marketplace and the XBLGI are similarly free and/or priced (although honestly the tools are pretty stunted in free form). I was really trying to make the point that the cost on xBox for developing games that get real promotion or are easily visible to users are very high and Microsoft gets overwhelmingly strong veto power over your apps/games.

what you describe ("if you aren't big and selling enough games, there aren't enough of you to pay the bills") is exactly the thinking I used to see inside Microsoft, not just around xBox, but around various development tools. it is a really really weird mindset today, though I think for xBox in the early days, when you really needed some low-level hardware tools to get the best juice out of the GPU, it still held a bit of whater. but that was then, and now game engines and GPU programming are much much easier. both Apple's XCode and Android development tools are basically free and there is a vast quantity of good quality graphics and physics and GLSL open source to draw on. they need to change their thinking about tools and access. they have to believe that developers will come and make great games and will be willing to give you a cut if you give them distribution, promotion, and access to your huge installed base of consoles.

(sorry that is a lame font, let me find the knob on that gizmo)

ha! i guess i write mostly crap software, too :) i really wasn't trying to imply that you should simply open up the market to self-publishing with no restrictions or oversight. that would screw the customers and therefore the brand very quickly. we did this poorly at microsoft with windows in the early days, and they are still doing it. it's tragic how easily malware still spreads on windows. it's amazing to me that android has so much malware, that google didn't think through security and sandboxing well enough. or revocations, etc. if i were to make a recommendation for xBox development, it would be to build a developer program where I could develop on my console and a few other (100?) consoles (so i could test), akin to how we can do iOS development, and apps would have to be submitted to a store and approved with a little less weird oversight than Apple uses, but quite a bit more oversight than Google or Microsoft uses, to make sure they aren't doing something evil or stupid or aren't malware. it's not so much a belief that making life easier for developers is the most important thing as it is the belief that a free market will allow customers to get great apps and will prevent artificial barriers in distribution and promotion from blocking innovation. customers will spend money where there is innovation.

yes, apologies for over-stating it generally or under-specifying US as the "crushing it" market. i do mean US and in general the fact that xBox currently has the most "mo" getting xBox ahead of Nintendo and Sony in their native territories was always expected to be a long, uphill slog.

OK, I have to admit at first I thought there was something wrong with the site because I didn't recognize enough books... but after reading some excerpts of books off the lists, I'm psyched -- turns out I just haven't been finding the good books for a long time, so now I can.

Suggests:

* show me excerpts on-page (if possible from amzn?)

* allow community +1/-1 on books and generate lists based on top-rated by site users

* commenting, facebook or disquss, on each book

(little issue: Facebook "like" button on main page and book pages doesn't seem to be working -- dunno if that's facebook's problem not yours)

sweet! serendipitously just what i need this week picking insurance and all the information more quickly and better organized than sites like ehealthinsurance.com et al. wants:

- side-by-side comparison (check several, show all)

- easy print-out of plans and side-by-sides, or PDF-gen

- tool-tips for filters at left. nice tool-tips on terms in rows already

- filter by deductible, co-pay, premium amnts (eg <$500)?