There is a simple solution for that: Host your servers in Iceland and get an .is-domain. Alternatives are the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Ukraine.
The latest ever since the AACS key for DVD decryption has been leaked and the companies tried to stop its spread, it should be clear that the measures Nintendo takes are merely of temporary nature.
Hosting in the US with a corporate-friendly forge like GitHub will spell your demise on the subjects involving copyright and the like. youtube-dl had similar issue with the music industry. Your org can be unethical like ICE, but how dare you want the ability to backup your content, unlock your device, or broaden access for homebrew for those that can’t afford devkits because piracy could happen (meanwhile they resell you digital downloads that don’t port and the servers get shutdown so you can’t redownload any purchases).
Honestly, I consider that to be a good thing. If a government entity is behaving unethically then it’s accountable to the government, which is accountable to the electorate. Do you want your government or branches of its civil service or military to be accountable to multinational companies?
The public pressure campaign was the electorate, it just wasn’t an election. GitHub already had a choice whether they take the money, we’re just discussing the inputs for them making the decision. The real question you are asking is: should corporations reputations be influenced by who they choose to do business with?
The real question you are asking is: should corporations reputations be influenced by who they choose to do business with?
I one direction, definitely. If a company chooses to give money to an unethical business, that should flow down to the decisions of companies that may choose to give them money. In the opposite direction, it makes me very nervous. It’s one thing for a company to say ‘we consider country X’s government to be unethical and so we won’t do business with country X’, but a company the size of Microsoft refusing to do business with a particular government department has a significant impact on that department’s ability to operate. In the case of ICE, I personally consider their behaviour abhorrent, but I want them to stop because they are accountable to a government that is accountable to an electorate, not because they a trillion dollar company made a decision to stop doing business with them. Once you set the precedent that this is acceptable, your country’s policy decisions can always be overridden by big companies (this already happens more than it should) and that’s a big problem for democracy.
I am a Microsoft shareholder, but not a US citizen. My influence on US government policy should, if the US is a functioning democracy, be less than that of any US citizen, irrespective of how many MSFT shares I own. If Microsoft can refuse to do business with certain branches of the government on the basis of their policies, that is not the case.
Man I hate using this example because it’s mad trite and it’s a meme that I’ve automatically lost, but should we pass judgement on IBM for supplying machines to produce a more efficient holocaust? That shit was legal and it is not in question whether they knew what the equipment was being used for.
As a shareholder that ICE contract was accepted to enrich you personally. I am not holding you responsible, that would be unreasonable. But your argument is indistinguishable, if you’re looking at outcomes, from saying that they’re gonna snatch those kids anyways so you might as well make a buck off of it.
Man I hate using this example because it’s mad trite and it’s a meme that I’ve automatically lost, but should we pass judgement on IBM for supplying machines to produce a more efficient holocaust?
IBM had the choice of pulling out of the German market entirely, as did other companies. It’s been a while since I studied this example in detail, but I vaguely remember that IBM kept selling things to the Germans after they were on the US export control list.
The Nazi government endorsed genocide and that’s well past the point where I’d expect a company to decide to not do business in the country at all and also well past the point where I’d expect it to be under international sanctions, which remove the decision from the company. But would you be okay with IBM selling machines to handle payroll for the Nazi government’s civil service, but not selling to the branches of the government that managed the concentration camps?
But your argument is indistinguishable, if you’re looking at outcomes, from saying that they’re gonna snatch those kids anyways so you might as well make a buck off of it.
That’s not my argument at all. My argument is that a multinational company has the ability to exercise a lot of influence without accountability and I don’t want that power to be exerted to override policy decisions that are accountable. If a country’s government is not accountable to its citizens, that’s a good reason for not doing business in that country. If it is, then you have a choice of whether you want to operate there or not. If you think the policies are acceptable, then you should not pick and choose who you do business with (I don’t mind as much if smaller companies do this, but it’s easy for that to get into systemic discrimination if it’s directed at individuals, so there’s a lot of subtlety there).
The behaviour of ICE might be a valid reason to refuse to do business in the USA (though difficult for a company that employs most of its people there), but if a multinational company can bully a national government into having policies that I agree with then it can also bully governments into having policies that I disagree with. The latter case is much more likely because the interests of a random citizen rarely align with the interests of a trillion dollar megacorp. If you’re going to hand someone a gun, you should make sure you know where they’re going to point it and I don’t trust large corporations to point it in a direction I’d be happy with. Democratic governments are far from perfect but they’re a lot more accountable than anything else we have right now.
well past the point where I’d expect it to be under international sanctions,
The concept of international sanctions emerged after the Second World War, so pre-war IBM wouldn’t have been affected.
I’ll need to read up more, but did IBM de facto break US law by continuing to deal with Nazi Germany, or did they evade it by having a German subsidiary?
If a country’s government is not accountable to its citizens, that’s a good reason for not doing business in that country.
Unfortunately, most authoritarian governments are quite good at exhibiting the trappings of accountability. Voting was universal (and compulsory!) in the Soviet Union. Iran has regular elections (with female suffrage) but the candidates the voters can choose are all carefully vetted by the government.
I did not mean to say that your argument was that you should make a buck off of it. My point was, your argument has an equivalent outcome to the one I suggested, which is that you don’t need to make any changes.
Your argument that by the time it makes sense to refuse service they would be sanctioned is not an ethical argument, it is freeing corporations from the concept of ethics. It’s freeing you from the concept of ethics in your investment portfolio. Let’s just let the law handle it. Surely the citizenry will respond at the polls. Surely the international community will evenly apply censure. It’s not my place to interfere.
But would you be okay with IBM selling machines to handle payroll for the Nazi government’s civil service, but not selling to the branches of the government that managed the concentration camps?
This is such a weird fucking question. ICE is not the civil service. They’re the organization committing acts of genocide. You don’t need to get all thought experiment with it.
Your argument that by the time it makes sense to refuse service they would be sanctioned is not an ethical argument, it is freeing corporations from the concept of ethics.
No, it’s balancing two ethical obligations. Genocides, looking at history, have almost always happened as a result of a large unaccountable power structure. If multinational corporations are able to override governments, then you have created large unaccountable power structures. You can build a civilisation that depends on large unaccountable power structures behaving ethically, or you can build one where unaccountable power structures may not override accountable ones. I would much prefer the latter because it’s been done with some limited success over various periods in history, whereas the former has led to most of the suffering in human history.
When you do a thing that another entity needs done, and that entity needs that thing done so that they can do something horrible, you are enabling that horrible thing. If you do not do that thing you are not stopping that thing from being done, rather you are not actively enabling that thing.
Unaccountable powers not doing a thing that they are not obligated to do does not offer the same risk as them doing things. The powers you describe as accountable have duties to act, but routinely unevenly distribute resources and violence. IBM, Microsoft, any of these unaccountable powers can only harm by doing. They cannot harm by not accepting the obligation to do something as it is not preexisting. The US government has an obligation to the security of those in their custody. Microsoft can only become more culpable by voluntarily becoming involved.
I’m having trouble even understanding what you are for. You would have been against refusal of the ICE contract. Are you in favor of businesses being required to take government contracts? Of businesses being unable to consider ethics outside of legal obligation when deciding what work to do? Of businesses somehow not being accountable to consumer sentiment?
When you do a thing that another entity needs done, and that entity needs that thing done so that they can do something horrible, you are enabling that horrible thing
The crux of the matter is defining what is a horrible thing. I do not trust corporations to make that judgement. If a corporation decides that homosexuality is a sin, can it exert enough pressure on a government by withholding its services that it would force a change in policy to outlaw gay marriage or even allowing gay people to become teachers? If it decides that jews or black people are not real humans, can it exert enough pressure on a government by withholding its services to ensure that human rights laws don’t pass? Microsoft is a big enough company that it could do that and I am deeply uncomfortable with establishing a precedent that would allow it to do so.
I’m having trouble even understanding what you are for. You would have been against refusal of the ICE contract. Are you in favor of businesses being required to take government contracts? Of businesses being unable to consider ethics outside of legal obligation when deciding what work to do? Of businesses somehow not being accountable to consumer sentiment?
Once a company (or an oligopoly) becomes sufficiently large that refusing service to another group is sufficient to disadvantage that group, then it should have the equivalent of universal service obligations. If it refuses to be in a particular market (e.g. defense) that’s fine. If it has a product for a particular use and refuses to sell it to a particular customer on moral grounds, that’s not fine because the corporation is imposing its own ethical view on a society with little or no accountability.
I don’t believe that ICE is acting in an ethical manner, I believe that allowing Microsoft (or Google, or Walmart, or any other large corporation) to be the arbiter of what is ethical for government organisations is far more dangerous in the long run than anything that ICE is doing.
Based on my own experience being Swedish, it’s quite easy to find “pressure points” in a smaller country like Iceland and the Netherlands and effecting change through a small number of legislators who can draft a law changing something. Were NL or IS to become seen as safe havens for copyright scofflaws, you can bet domain seizures will happen even if the majority of voters might be against it.
I don’t know if these measures are of a temporary nature. From what I’ve heard around the web over the years, Nintendo is known for their aggressive DMCA takedowns.
Unfortunately that is something that will obviously never materialize…
Actual solution is updating the regulations that allow for this kind of thing… In some countries it’s already legal to circumvent DRM for media you own, so it’s not nearly as far-fetched as open source everything.
Oh yeah this specific case it’s just straight-up piracy, not really defending it for this one, but these tools are there so you can play your own games where you want to play them. They’re not providing you keys, they’re just letting you get the keys off the console you already paid for. Nintendo still gets their money. This shouldn’t be illegal.
The tools are written for games the devs/users already own. The problem now is that a not released game was leaked and some people use the tools to play and stream this pirated game.
I’m oversimplifying here, but PCs are the closest we currently have to open hardware. We still have graphics cards and Secure Boot is becoming increasingly mandatory, but still. That’s an open platform. For now.
Now let’s say we design an actual game console, and make it open hardware. Ideally something like the Switch, which in my opinion strikes an amazing balance between power and versatility. Let’s go a step further and make sure the hardware is not only powerful, but easy to use, with well defined and simple interfaces and efficient Instruction Set Architectures (that allow low-energy and high-performance code). Something that solves the 30 million lines problem basically.
(I’m not certain this thing would have to be open hardware, though the most efficient route would obviously to have all hardware manufacturers work together on one really good design then produce it as efficiently as possible… but that would probably require bringing down Capitalism itself.)
Now we just got ourselves another PC. Sure it may be optimised for games, but game consoles are freaking computers. Jailbroken Switches running Linux are a prime example. In the end your thing would be much more useful and important than a mere game console. Which is a good thing by the way: electronic waste is a catastrophe, and one way to reduce it is to cut down the number of devices we need. One computer to rule them all seems pretty rad, doesn’t it?
Note one thing though: when everything is open like that, you lose some ability to prevent cheating on multiplayer online games. I personally would gladly sacrifice this, but we should be mindful of the minor disadvantages.
The SteamDeck is a very good compromise indeed. Though suboptimal in my opinion in two respects:
It’s an x86-64 ISA, and as such unavoidably more wasteful and power hungry than something like ARM or RISC-V (the “x86 tax”, I’ve seen numbers as high as 20%). Unfortunately that’s what you have to do to actually play games from Steam. But if you ditch backward compatibility, as game consoles have always done, there are better architectures even if we optimise for PC workloads.
If we redid all the software from scratch we could make it much more efficient and leaner (such that we wouldn’t need nearly as much compute power as we do now), and likely exploit parallelism better. In fact I’m betting many, perhaps most, compute intensive tasks would work better on more in-order parallel cores than they would in fewer out-of-order powerhouses (In terms of something like energy × die area). We still need the out-of-order cores, but having easy access to GPU-like compute could likely do wonders.
The hand held controls are fused to the console so you cannot adapt them to your use case. They have most games covered, but there are other use cases and accessibility issues. The Switch on the other hand can swap controls for pretty much anything we’d like. Better Joy-Con controllers would come to mind obviously, but I’m also thinking on adding in a keyboard with keys on the back, that you could touch type just like a regular keyboard (except your hands are oriented differently).
If it works out this would turn a Switch into a portable workstation, where you can be productive even without access to a docking station. Something hand held you could call “computer” with a straight face.
I personally would donate to a crowdfunding campaign to stand up to Nintendo in court over tactics like this (I’m imagining something similar to the fundraising GNOME Foundation did to fight patent trolls targeting them).
I wish someone would do this. This behavior is blatantly user-hostile bullying. I don’t know how likely such a suit is to win, though.
The problem is really the fact that the Bleem case set precedent that made emulation legal, so companies really really want to settle out of court to avoid the existential risks that unfavorable precedent could set. Note that they are going through copyright takedown procedures, not actually legal action against the developers themselves.
Hmm, I hadn’t hear of this and am obviously not an expert - but reading about this on Wikipedia it seems like the disputes were around the PS BIOSes and not really about emulation itself?
Note that they are going through copyright takedown procedures, not actually legal action against the developers themselves.
I should have clarified - I was imagining that the emulator authors would send a DMCA counter-notice and Nintendo, being Nintendo, would sue. The fund would be used for that lawsuit. (I do completely understand though why folks who just wanted to work on a cool piece of technology wouldn’t want to be wrapped up in all that.)
FYI, Nintendo is infamous for being very very aggressive on their DMCA takedowns. This isn’t the first time and it will almost definitely not be the last.
I don’t think so. Because most normal customers are not affected. They buy a Console with some games and play them. To play games on there own Computer is not a feature most users want/need.
Also this case is a bit different, because Nintendo don’t choose to be evil just to be evil. They currently want to prevent pirates from playing a not jet released game. I don’t think this will help, but I can clearly understand the reasoning.
Hah. It’s just another day in the “Nintendo being assholes” news cycle.
Even amongst the small group of people who care right now, a good chunk are going to stop caring as soon as the next installment of ${NOSTALGIC_NINTENDO_ONLY_FRANCHISE} gets announced.
There is a simple solution for that: Host your servers in Iceland and get an .is-domain. Alternatives are the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Ukraine.
The latest ever since the AACS key for DVD decryption has been leaked and the companies tried to stop its spread, it should be clear that the measures Nintendo takes are merely of temporary nature.
Hosting in the US with a corporate-friendly forge like GitHub will spell your demise on the subjects involving copyright and the like.
youtube-dlhad similar issue with the music industry. Your org can be unethical like ICE, but how dare you want the ability to backup your content, unlock your device, or broaden access for homebrew for those that can’t afford devkits because piracy could happen (meanwhile they resell you digital downloads that don’t port and the servers get shutdown so you can’t redownload any purchases).Well put! And that’s the reason why we should make sure that GitHub does not become the major default.
s/become/remain
Honestly, I consider that to be a good thing. If a government entity is behaving unethically then it’s accountable to the government, which is accountable to the electorate. Do you want your government or branches of its civil service or military to be accountable to multinational companies?
The public pressure campaign was the electorate, it just wasn’t an election. GitHub already had a choice whether they take the money, we’re just discussing the inputs for them making the decision. The real question you are asking is: should corporations reputations be influenced by who they choose to do business with?
I one direction, definitely. If a company chooses to give money to an unethical business, that should flow down to the decisions of companies that may choose to give them money. In the opposite direction, it makes me very nervous. It’s one thing for a company to say ‘we consider country X’s government to be unethical and so we won’t do business with country X’, but a company the size of Microsoft refusing to do business with a particular government department has a significant impact on that department’s ability to operate. In the case of ICE, I personally consider their behaviour abhorrent, but I want them to stop because they are accountable to a government that is accountable to an electorate, not because they a trillion dollar company made a decision to stop doing business with them. Once you set the precedent that this is acceptable, your country’s policy decisions can always be overridden by big companies (this already happens more than it should) and that’s a big problem for democracy.
I am a Microsoft shareholder, but not a US citizen. My influence on US government policy should, if the US is a functioning democracy, be less than that of any US citizen, irrespective of how many MSFT shares I own. If Microsoft can refuse to do business with certain branches of the government on the basis of their policies, that is not the case.
Man I hate using this example because it’s mad trite and it’s a meme that I’ve automatically lost, but should we pass judgement on IBM for supplying machines to produce a more efficient holocaust? That shit was legal and it is not in question whether they knew what the equipment was being used for.
As a shareholder that ICE contract was accepted to enrich you personally. I am not holding you responsible, that would be unreasonable. But your argument is indistinguishable, if you’re looking at outcomes, from saying that they’re gonna snatch those kids anyways so you might as well make a buck off of it.
IBM had the choice of pulling out of the German market entirely, as did other companies. It’s been a while since I studied this example in detail, but I vaguely remember that IBM kept selling things to the Germans after they were on the US export control list.
The Nazi government endorsed genocide and that’s well past the point where I’d expect a company to decide to not do business in the country at all and also well past the point where I’d expect it to be under international sanctions, which remove the decision from the company. But would you be okay with IBM selling machines to handle payroll for the Nazi government’s civil service, but not selling to the branches of the government that managed the concentration camps?
That’s not my argument at all. My argument is that a multinational company has the ability to exercise a lot of influence without accountability and I don’t want that power to be exerted to override policy decisions that are accountable. If a country’s government is not accountable to its citizens, that’s a good reason for not doing business in that country. If it is, then you have a choice of whether you want to operate there or not. If you think the policies are acceptable, then you should not pick and choose who you do business with (I don’t mind as much if smaller companies do this, but it’s easy for that to get into systemic discrimination if it’s directed at individuals, so there’s a lot of subtlety there).
The behaviour of ICE might be a valid reason to refuse to do business in the USA (though difficult for a company that employs most of its people there), but if a multinational company can bully a national government into having policies that I agree with then it can also bully governments into having policies that I disagree with. The latter case is much more likely because the interests of a random citizen rarely align with the interests of a trillion dollar megacorp. If you’re going to hand someone a gun, you should make sure you know where they’re going to point it and I don’t trust large corporations to point it in a direction I’d be happy with. Democratic governments are far from perfect but they’re a lot more accountable than anything else we have right now.
The concept of international sanctions emerged after the Second World War, so pre-war IBM wouldn’t have been affected.
I’ll need to read up more, but did IBM de facto break US law by continuing to deal with Nazi Germany, or did they evade it by having a German subsidiary?
Unfortunately, most authoritarian governments are quite good at exhibiting the trappings of accountability. Voting was universal (and compulsory!) in the Soviet Union. Iran has regular elections (with female suffrage) but the candidates the voters can choose are all carefully vetted by the government.
My guy. The forcible transfer of children is an act of genocide
I did not mean to say that your argument was that you should make a buck off of it. My point was, your argument has an equivalent outcome to the one I suggested, which is that you don’t need to make any changes.
Your argument that by the time it makes sense to refuse service they would be sanctioned is not an ethical argument, it is freeing corporations from the concept of ethics. It’s freeing you from the concept of ethics in your investment portfolio. Let’s just let the law handle it. Surely the citizenry will respond at the polls. Surely the international community will evenly apply censure. It’s not my place to interfere.
This is such a weird fucking question. ICE is not the civil service. They’re the organization committing acts of genocide. You don’t need to get all thought experiment with it.
No, it’s balancing two ethical obligations. Genocides, looking at history, have almost always happened as a result of a large unaccountable power structure. If multinational corporations are able to override governments, then you have created large unaccountable power structures. You can build a civilisation that depends on large unaccountable power structures behaving ethically, or you can build one where unaccountable power structures may not override accountable ones. I would much prefer the latter because it’s been done with some limited success over various periods in history, whereas the former has led to most of the suffering in human history.
When you do a thing that another entity needs done, and that entity needs that thing done so that they can do something horrible, you are enabling that horrible thing. If you do not do that thing you are not stopping that thing from being done, rather you are not actively enabling that thing.
Unaccountable powers not doing a thing that they are not obligated to do does not offer the same risk as them doing things. The powers you describe as accountable have duties to act, but routinely unevenly distribute resources and violence. IBM, Microsoft, any of these unaccountable powers can only harm by doing. They cannot harm by not accepting the obligation to do something as it is not preexisting. The US government has an obligation to the security of those in their custody. Microsoft can only become more culpable by voluntarily becoming involved.
I’m having trouble even understanding what you are for. You would have been against refusal of the ICE contract. Are you in favor of businesses being required to take government contracts? Of businesses being unable to consider ethics outside of legal obligation when deciding what work to do? Of businesses somehow not being accountable to consumer sentiment?
The crux of the matter is defining what is a horrible thing. I do not trust corporations to make that judgement. If a corporation decides that homosexuality is a sin, can it exert enough pressure on a government by withholding its services that it would force a change in policy to outlaw gay marriage or even allowing gay people to become teachers? If it decides that jews or black people are not real humans, can it exert enough pressure on a government by withholding its services to ensure that human rights laws don’t pass? Microsoft is a big enough company that it could do that and I am deeply uncomfortable with establishing a precedent that would allow it to do so.
Once a company (or an oligopoly) becomes sufficiently large that refusing service to another group is sufficient to disadvantage that group, then it should have the equivalent of universal service obligations. If it refuses to be in a particular market (e.g. defense) that’s fine. If it has a product for a particular use and refuses to sell it to a particular customer on moral grounds, that’s not fine because the corporation is imposing its own ethical view on a society with little or no accountability.
I don’t believe that ICE is acting in an ethical manner, I believe that allowing Microsoft (or Google, or Walmart, or any other large corporation) to be the arbiter of what is ethical for government organisations is far more dangerous in the long run than anything that ICE is doing.
[Comment removed by author]
What about Iceland or Netherlands protects your domain name registration?
There is good historical precedent.
But no iron-clad legal guarantees?
Based on my own experience being Swedish, it’s quite easy to find “pressure points” in a smaller country like Iceland and the Netherlands and effecting change through a small number of legislators who can draft a law changing something. Were NL or IS to become seen as safe havens for copyright scofflaws, you can bet domain seizures will happen even if the majority of voters might be against it.
I don’t know if these measures are of a temporary nature. From what I’ve heard around the web over the years, Nintendo is known for their aggressive DMCA takedowns.
These countries did not sign the DMCA.
I understand that, what I was replying to was this part:
Are the “measures” you say Nintendo is taking not referring the DMCAs?
Ah I see! Sorry for the misunderstanding.
No worries mate! :)
The actual solution to all this is to release your own open hardware games platform and open source games alongside it.
Yeah, like the Ouya! oh wait
Still have mine. It’s very nice
Can’t wait for super tux odyssey
Unfortunately that is something that will obviously never materialize…
Actual solution is updating the regulations that allow for this kind of thing… In some countries it’s already legal to circumvent DRM for media you own, so it’s not nearly as far-fetched as open source everything.
I didn’t realize people were circumventing DRM for a game that they already owned. I had the impression this was a new game not released yet.
Oh yeah this specific case it’s just straight-up piracy, not really defending it for this one, but these tools are there so you can play your own games where you want to play them. They’re not providing you keys, they’re just letting you get the keys off the console you already paid for. Nintendo still gets their money. This shouldn’t be illegal.
The tools are written for games the devs/users already own. The problem now is that a not released game was leaked and some people use the tools to play and stream this pirated game.
That’s basically a PC…
I’m oversimplifying here, but PCs are the closest we currently have to open hardware. We still have graphics cards and Secure Boot is becoming increasingly mandatory, but still. That’s an open platform. For now.
Now let’s say we design an actual game console, and make it open hardware. Ideally something like the Switch, which in my opinion strikes an amazing balance between power and versatility. Let’s go a step further and make sure the hardware is not only powerful, but easy to use, with well defined and simple interfaces and efficient Instruction Set Architectures (that allow low-energy and high-performance code). Something that solves the 30 million lines problem basically.
(I’m not certain this thing would have to be open hardware, though the most efficient route would obviously to have all hardware manufacturers work together on one really good design then produce it as efficiently as possible… but that would probably require bringing down Capitalism itself.)
Now we just got ourselves another PC. Sure it may be optimised for games, but game consoles are freaking computers. Jailbroken Switches running Linux are a prime example. In the end your thing would be much more useful and important than a mere game console. Which is a good thing by the way: electronic waste is a catastrophe, and one way to reduce it is to cut down the number of devices we need. One computer to rule them all seems pretty rad, doesn’t it?
Note one thing though: when everything is open like that, you lose some ability to prevent cheating on multiplayer online games. I personally would gladly sacrifice this, but we should be mindful of the minor disadvantages.
We have SteamDeck which is a PC in nice enclosure.
The SteamDeck is a very good compromise indeed. Though suboptimal in my opinion in two respects:
It’s an x86-64 ISA, and as such unavoidably more wasteful and power hungry than something like ARM or RISC-V (the “x86 tax”, I’ve seen numbers as high as 20%). Unfortunately that’s what you have to do to actually play games from Steam. But if you ditch backward compatibility, as game consoles have always done, there are better architectures even if we optimise for PC workloads.
If we redid all the software from scratch we could make it much more efficient and leaner (such that we wouldn’t need nearly as much compute power as we do now), and likely exploit parallelism better. In fact I’m betting many, perhaps most, compute intensive tasks would work better on more in-order parallel cores than they would in fewer out-of-order powerhouses (In terms of something like energy × die area). We still need the out-of-order cores, but having easy access to GPU-like compute could likely do wonders.
The hand held controls are fused to the console so you cannot adapt them to your use case. They have most games covered, but there are other use cases and accessibility issues. The Switch on the other hand can swap controls for pretty much anything we’d like. Better Joy-Con controllers would come to mind obviously, but I’m also thinking on adding in a keyboard with keys on the back, that you could touch type just like a regular keyboard (except your hands are oriented differently).
If it works out this would turn a Switch into a portable workstation, where you can be productive even without access to a docking station. Something hand held you could call “computer” with a straight face.
I personally would donate to a crowdfunding campaign to stand up to Nintendo in court over tactics like this (I’m imagining something similar to the fundraising GNOME Foundation did to fight patent trolls targeting them).
I wish someone would do this. This behavior is blatantly user-hostile bullying. I don’t know how likely such a suit is to win, though.
The problem is really the fact that the Bleem case set precedent that made emulation legal, so companies really really want to settle out of court to avoid the existential risks that unfavorable precedent could set. Note that they are going through copyright takedown procedures, not actually legal action against the developers themselves.
Hmm, I hadn’t hear of this and am obviously not an expert - but reading about this on Wikipedia it seems like the disputes were around the PS BIOSes and not really about emulation itself?
I should have clarified - I was imagining that the emulator authors would send a DMCA counter-notice and Nintendo, being Nintendo, would sue. The fund would be used for that lawsuit. (I do completely understand though why folks who just wanted to work on a cool piece of technology wouldn’t want to be wrapped up in all that.)
FYI, Nintendo is infamous for being very very aggressive on their DMCA takedowns. This isn’t the first time and it will almost definitely not be the last.
So, Nintendo is dead now?
I really don’t need a console game system anyway. It’s not like my eyeballs lack for diversions.
I don’t think so. Because most normal customers are not affected. They buy a Console with some games and play them. To play games on there own Computer is not a feature most users want/need.
Also this case is a bit different, because Nintendo don’t choose to be evil just to be evil. They currently want to prevent pirates from playing a not jet released game. I don’t think this will help, but I can clearly understand the reasoning.
Hah. It’s just another day in the “Nintendo being assholes” news cycle.
Even amongst the small group of people who care right now, a good chunk are going to stop caring as soon as the next installment of
${NOSTALGIC_NINTENDO_ONLY_FRANCHISE}gets announced.People were super mad at Sony a few years back, and they’re still around, so I think Nintendo will be fine.