Stardate 20020603.1619

(On Screen): USS Clueless is hosted on a Cobalt Qube 3 which I bought last year for $1295. It came with 64M of 100 MHz RAM, a 20G HD, and it uses a 300 MHz K6-2 for a CPU. The only change I made to it was to stuff it with 512M of RAM. By current standards its hardware is really quite primitive, but when you're running Apache on Linux and not doing a lot of server-side scripting (which I'm not) then it runs plenty well. It connects to my cable modem via ethernet.

It is the nature of the console game business that they sell the consoles at a considerable loss, and make the money back on sales of the games. They need to get a huge installed base of consoles in place in order to generate a lot of volume of game sales, and given that current consoles are actually impressively powerful computers, the customer demographic for consoles would not be willing to pay what the hardware is actually worth. The market price-point break seems to be about $300; anything above that is certain to be a commercial failure. $200 is better, and that's what Microsoft's XBox is currently selling for.

It's got an x86 CPU in it running something like 700 MHz; it also has more RAM than my Qube shipped with and an 8G HD (IIRC), and an ethernet port. With proper software, it would make a superb small server. (I've speculated about this before.) And it would do Microsoft no good at all to be selling XBoxes at a loss to people tossing Linux on them and making servers out of them.

Microsoft apparently was aware of the problem, and actually incorporated some security in the system to make it impossible for it to run generic software. Now a guy at MIT has cracked it.

He's not sneaking around on this; he apparently let Microsoft know what he'd done and gave them a copy of his paper before he published it online. But publish it he did, and now the information is out in the wild. I figure we'll see a Linux implementation on a bootable CD for XBox within six months.

Sony seems not to have bothered worrying about it. Sony actually makes and ships a version of Linux for their PS2; used to be available only to developers, but now it's pretty much available for everyone. It is their development system, in fact. I don't know if it has limitations imposed on it which would prevent it from being used as a generic server, but it's not clear that the PS2 would be a good choice for that anyway because it has a weird hardware architecture.

But the XBox is really just a modified PC, and the basic software it runs is a form of Windows. Adapting Linux for it shouldn't be too difficult, especially if they're willing to forgo a display driver. (And you don't need one; the only display on my Qube is an LED panel used with a couple of pushbuttons to set up the ethernet port. Thereafter you operate the entire thing through a web browser.)

What I'm wondering is whether Andrew Huang is going to be charged under the DMCA. Unlike Adobe, I don't think Microsoft will try to get the government down on him. (Microsoft's management aren't damn-fools.) Still, I find myself hoping that someone does, even though I don't wish ill to Huang for what he's done.

We all hoped that last year's contretemps between RIAA and Professor Edward Felton would give us the constitutional test of the DMCA, but RIAA retreated on it and the courts dismissed Felton's lawsuit as being moot. We've got the Adobe case going on now, but it may be decided on jurisdictional grounds (the offense occurred in Russia; the law may not apply) rather than on the basis of the First Amendment. But Huang did his work within the US and I believe that he has violated the DMCA. Those provisions of the DMCA are an unconstitutional violation of our right of free expression, and we need some court to take notice and say so.