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Toys Programming IT Technology

Lego Welcomes Hack Of Their Design Program 149

Posted by Zonk from the come-on-in dept.
fdiskne1 writes "We've all heard about big companies suing their customers for hacking a product they purchased. It's about time we hear about a company that welcomes it. One of the most geek-friendly toys has just gotten geek-friendlier. CNet News.com has a story about how the Lego company is cheering the fact that people are hacking their public design program to better fit their customers' needs. Lego has a free program (available for Windows and Mac) that allows a person to put in their own 3D design and the program will tell the customer which Lego 'palettes' they need to order to complete the design. The problem with it was that the palettes each contained a number of bags of different shape and color Lego blocks. If someone needed only one block out of a particular palette, they would end up with many bags of bricks they didn't need. The hack involved someone taking an inventory of how many bricks are included in each bag. The program would then tell the customer how many BAGS of each to order, greatly reducing the number of bricks the customer would have ended up not using in the project. I can think of many companies that wouldn't think of doing such a thing. In fact, I can think of many companies that would intentionally use the flaw in their program to make the customer buy even more."
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Lego Welcomes Hack Of Their Design Program More

Lego Welcomes Hack Of Their Design Program

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  • Lego without limits (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CDMA_Demo ( 841347 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:12PM (#13577408) Homepage

    Don't you think the very reason Lego is popular is because it allows people DYI in many ways? You can make robots, cranes, smart buildings and other things out of Lego and thats the reason the company is alive. Why would they want to force their customers into doing otherwise?

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:15PM (#13577480)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The "I'm Not Going To Prom" page (Score:5, Funny)

    by ChrisF79 ( 829953 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:16PM (#13577489) Homepage
    Take a look at this lineup. Think these folks went to prom?
    http://www.lego.com/eng/factory/design/bios.asp [lego.com]

  • Long Term Ideas. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) *
    Well by making a program hacker friendly. They just allow more people to consider using Legos. For all the people who buy legos in bulk and they end up loosing the money on a couple bags out of 100 it is worth it. First they will have more blocks to sell to their core market of smaller bags in the normal lego sets, at a higher price/brick. Also it allows hobiest to save money thus being able to put the money to future projects. So you Gray DeathStar is completed. and you saved a couple bags of legos. The m

  • I Only Wish (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Krast0r ( 843081 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:27PM (#13577614) Homepage Journal
    I wish that more companies would follow the recent examples of Lego and the BBC; instead of just sending out legal threats and public announcements as a reaction to something they should consider why people are doing it. The BBC realised that people were recording and distributing Dr.Who and while they took a hardline on this (as it is, after all, piracy) they also decided that they should make their shows available on the internet as people are obviously looking for other ways to view their favourite shows. Here, Lego have taken the rational direction and thought "how does it harm us?" and have realised it doesn't, it just opens more creative dimensions. Companies rarely have anything to gain by sending constant legal threats (recent examples include RIAA and the MPAA) and may do well to think of why people are doing it in the first place, and how they can change their stance for mutual benefit.
    • I think the major problem with business is the mindset that one must have a plan, follow the plan, and everything that isn't in the plan is Evil(tm).

      Granted, the operation of any large organization hinges on the ability to make consitent decisions on all levels of management. What get Big Business into trouble is that the scarecely make a decision beyond that of a front-line manager, i.e. reactionary.

    • I wish that more companies would follow the recent examples of Lego and the BBC ...

      Don't we all (except the laywers, and who gives a fuck about them anyway).

      Give it time, it's only early days yet. When companies see that it's the smart choice (ie. profitable) to be reasonable then they will be.

      Rabid litigation has got to be one of the worst cultural exports of the US ever.

  • Great marketing move (Score:5, Insightful)

    by andrewman327 ( 635952 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:29PM (#13577643) Homepage Journal
    I am sure that many people only know about this application because of Lego's allowing people to hack it. I had not heard of it until I read this thread. Regardless of how many units they might lose from this hack, they will make money from increased awareness. How many people do you think read this /. thread and tried the program for the first time?
    • Unfortunately there isn't a linux version, and while I am probably in the minority of /. users who don't have at least one (working) windows/apple box to try the program out, otherwise I would love to try the program(worst to worst it'd be fun to waste some time with)

  • Too bad (Score:3, Insightful)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:30PM (#13577652) Homepage Journal
    Lego is also losing money hand over fist....
    • Someone needs to mod the parent up. It doesn't matter how "nice" a company is if its business model isn't sound.

      Lego doesn't make profits by selling individual bricks (or bags of identical bricks) to DYIers. Lego makes its money by promoting a particular collection of bricks as a "set" for building some larger thing (a moon rover, a race car, whatever). The profit comes from being able to sell that special collection (plus the design it is intended for) in a marketable box plastered with enticing picture

      • Re:Too bad (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Kadin2048 ( 468275 )
        If you read the CNet article, one of the LEGO execs talks about what seems to be a plan of theirs to (I'll summarize here rather than quote directly) 'let the customers run the company.' Not literally of course, but rather than just have the 100 in-house, presumably full time designers that they have right now making their boxed sets which are the company's bread and butter, they can use the LEGO Factory as a source for new product ideas.

        There's an example in the article of a kid who won a contest to design

    • Re:Too bad (Score:3, Insightful)

      by joelsanda ( 619660 )

      Lego is also losing money hand over fist....

      Can you provide data to support this? Any linkage?

  • Hooray For Lego (Score:4, Interesting)

    by taskforce ( 866056 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:34PM (#13577688) Homepage
    Lego is the original "Rip, Remix and Burn" passtime and I'm glad to see that they're sticking to their heritage. Three cheers for lego! Can you imagine the MPAA packaging ripping, video editing and burning tools with all that extra space on the DVDs?
    • Actually, I can see them introducing semi-crippled software that actually allows the user to remix, reedit and alllow short pieces to be ripped from music..

      All for a short song that is.. ^.^

      That is, IF they can get off of their old model marketing and see the light at the end of the tunnel.

  • All toys should be Lego compatible (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:35PM (#13577697)
    With the patents of basic Lego (and even 1985 flat pieces, technic and space lego) having expired I hope more Chinese toy makers will make all plastic toys Lego compatible.

    Would it not be great if kids who prefer playing with toy soldiers over building with Lego would still use their old lego to build bridges to blow up as the hole on the toy soldiers feet would be compatible with lego. If the interconnects between rockets, rocket-launcer, vehicle and hide-out could be hooked up to any of the other plastic toys?
    • The problem there is quality control. One of the reasons that Lego sets are so great is that you never get a half-molded piece... you never get pieces that don't snap together... you never get pieces that fall out due to temperature changes, etc. You also never get sets with missing pieces... Their plastic technologies are so precise that they actually have different molds for each color of brick, since they shrink to very very slightly different sizes (smaller than tenths of millimeters iirc) and they w
      • I think Tyco had that problem when they made a competing "lego" style product. I remember a lot of their stuff was loose fitting, sometimes to the point that they wouldn't stay together.
      • The only other building toy that I was ever particularly fond of as a kid (Fisher Price Construx) had problems that Legos never had. Specifically, their pieces wore out like crazy. I've never been sure whether this was a materials issue, or a design issue, or some of both. But after a particular part had been snapped together a bunch of times, you could feel it start to get weak. The feeling was just like the stiffness-before-breaking that you get before a thin piece of metal snaps.

        Since a lot of the Constr
    • Yes, I agree that all toymakers should make their toys compliant with an open standard.

      This way, MA government will be able to use today's toys with the toys of 2030.

    • Quality is extremely important (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CheeseTroll ( 696413 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @01:24PM (#13578227)
      My 5-year-old son has received a few small sets of imitation-Legos. They appear to be the correct size, etc., to intermingle with real Legos. But the quality of these imitations is so poor that pieces either don't stick together very well, or are impossible to pull apart, he gets pretty frustrated. Meanwhile, I let my sons play with my 20-year-old space legos all the time, and everything still fits together perfectly. You can get away with low quality with a lot of toys, but tiny little building bricks are not a place to cut corners.

      (Not that I wouldn't mind seeing a little competition keep prices lower on real Legos!)

      • Yeah I remember the same problem when I was a kid too. You couldn't build without pliers and screwdrivers cause the pieces where often stuck. I had clumps and clumps of Lego blocks that I just got too lazy to take apart.

        • Impossibly-stuck-together bricks wasn't limited to the bootleg LEGOs, though, it happened with the real ones too.

          The best accessory LEGO ever brought out, imo, was a little grey plastic lever type device called the "Brick Puller." It let you pry apart two even severely stuck bricks or plates, without hurting your fingers or breaking your own / parent's fingernails.

          The second best was the 'BrickVac,' a device for picking up loose parts scattered across a floor that worked sort of like a carpet cleaner. Reall
      • I used a set of fake legos some 15 years ago. None of them stuck together. They looked like lego bricks, but stacked like clay bricks and fell over in a big mess if you bumped them. Not fun.
    • There are already piles of lego "compatable" bricks. I have some around in theor own separate box somewhere.

      Why? Because they suck. I can count on one hand the number of legos I've had break in my lifetime. I've received one defective part, ever. I've never had a set missing parts.

      The lego bricks are high quality and plain old fit together way better than imitations.

  • better service (Score:3, Informative)

    by naoursla ( 99850 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:37PM (#13577716) Homepage Journal
    By doing this, Lego is providing a better service to their customers promoting increased sales in the future. Trying to rope your customers into buying things they do not want may increase sales in the short term but doesn't make sense long term.

  • But you have to ask.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by petra13 ( 785564 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:40PM (#13577747) Journal
    Is it really possibly to buy too many legos?

  • A toast... (Score:4, Funny)

    by tktk ( 540564 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:41PM (#13577757)
    to the Lego company...

    errr....just as soon as I finish building my chapagne glass.

  • Instead of welcoming hacks... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HateBreeder ( 656491 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:50PM (#13577855)
    Why not just go Open Source?

  • Lego aint THAT nice (Score:4, Informative)

    by nilbog ( 732352 ) on Friday September 16, 2005 @12:51PM (#13577862) Homepage Journal
    They threatened to sue me... http://www.livejournal.com/users/gthing/78721.html [livejournal.com]
  • I tried the program and maybe I missed something but it ran like crap on my machine. Its not a supercompter but a 1.7 Pentium M with a gig of ram and 64m Radeon 9000 should be able to run it fine. I mean, I could play WoW on this laptop without to much of a fuss. What gives?
  • Now if they could just find a way to "hack" the program so that it actualy works, that would be nice. It does not work for me or my brother on either of our (completely different) computers.

  • Someone get this to the guy who built a Lego version of Serenity from Firefly.

    I need to know what to buy!
  • The thing is with Lego is they want people to play with their stuff. Build, hack, smash, it's all the same to them. Just don't let it gather dust!
  • I can envision a block-exchange market that matches builders so that they can complete their individual projects with a minimal join purchase. It could get absurdly complex if you didn't keep strict bounds on the design parameters, but even a very simple function would be quite useful, and easily doable as a personal project.

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