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The Scoop on the Xbox 360's Embedded OS?
An anonymous reader writes "When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago amid much brouhaha over its custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each, WindowsForDevices.com wondered aloud, 'What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?' Now, the website thinks it has found the answer to its question. No, it's not Linux or BSD, nor a derivative of Longhorn or Windows CE."
Of course. The funny thing about the Xbox is that it's exactly like DOS was. When I first entered the computer industry, my 'mentor' told me, "The reason everyone used DOS was 'cause you could just copy it and pirate the thing all the time." I don't own an X-box, but the only reason I even CONSIDERED buying one was because if I did I could do what my friend did - rent five games and rip them all. Thus Microsoft profited when they sold him the Xbox, but all the game vendors and developers lost out.
Skip forward four or five years, and Xbox2 comes out. It's a lot harder to hack, (probably close to impossible) and, well, you're going to have to go online to play most games (and almost certainly all the Msoft games) from the specs, so uh... yeah. You have to pay. I hope Xbox2 falls flat on its face, but Microsoft has learned in the home entertainment game, just like they did in the PC game.
Isn't that neat?
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