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Comment by hastes | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the best reads in a long time. Awesome article and extremely interesting.

I have friends a long time ago that used to buy CoD modded lobbies from these guys. Crazy to see how their lives unfolded.

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It is quite a good read, but its sad to see how computing has continued to be locked away from the end user, affording them access to a walled garden of the manufacturers choosing, with no ability to change OSes or even install basic security updates without the hardware manufacturers consent and involvement.

Yet at the other end you will find people that in full earnestness argues for further locking down, because "owners" can't trusted with proper maintenance. This is why the "home" PC varaiants of Windows 10 force reboots and removed the group policy tool that could have made disabling it easy.

I interned in the Graphics kernel team at Microsoft and we worked quite a lot with xbox. None of those people like DRM and copy protection bullshit but the studios (both gaming and media) demand it and not having them could mean losing market share to others that are willing.

Cheat prevention is another big reason that often came up for the hardened environment.

At the same time there has never been another point in history where so much open source software is freely available to everyone.

I think I used Pokora's utility for adding water to Halo 2 levels. I remember when it came out and it seemed like all of the new custom Halo 2 levels people were making on halomods.com had customized water immediately.

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