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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."
Will this compromise hackability?
They are making the PowerPC for the Xbox and the Cell for the new Playstation. It seems like they will be the real winner in the next round of game wars.
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
I was hoping it'd be something incredible and barely believable, like OS X or BeOS or Plan 9. But no, it's just a derivative of the original XBox OS. Weak. All that suspense for almost nothing. This story is worse than the ending of Citizen Kane, when "Rosebud" turned out to be his sled.
Another one bites the dust
Well, since Microsoft used to sell WinNT for PowerPC (I used to have a few of the machines), and Win2K is just an update of WinNT, I presume it was pretty trivial for them to do this.
Didn't MS and billg say that stripping down the OS like this was impossible due to integration issues in a court of law? Did someone mislead the court? Or am I mistaken?
Anyway, this is just one more project branch to maintain. They now have Win2K, WinXP Home Edition, WinXP Pro, Win2003 server, WinCE and now another version for the XBox. For the server editions they need to support standard, enterprise and data center versions. And I think there is a version for the tablet PC, or is it just WinCE? No wonder MS wants cheaper code monkeys, keeping all the versions maintained and in synch has got to be a labor intensive nightmare.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
First off, it was pretty obvious that MS were going to use existing code on the original XBOX, if only because it was to all intents and puropses a PC. So at the time MS had the choice between using a Win 9X codebase, a CE codebase or NT/2000 codebase.
.NET or Avalon.
Windows 9X compatibility wasn't a requirement so could be ignored, CE was optimised for lower power CPUs and had been a less than a stellar success in the Dreamcast, whilst the NT/2000 codebase was optimised for higher end processors x86/PPC/MIPS/Alpha. It would seem that the choice was obvious. I dare say that MS stripped it down so that it's just the kernel of 2000 with thin wrappers of DirectX on top of the drivers together with a the minimum requirements of Win32 to keep DirectX and OpenGL running.
If we jump ahead to now, it seems obvious that MS would carry on using the same platform - just this time using the PPC branch of 2000, build new drivers and probably add more Win32 stuff to support the XNA architecture. If anything it seems unthinkable that they would use anything but an NT kernel.
I would be more interested to know if Win360 (I know this is Slashdot and Microsoft is only interesting when it's monopolising the cure for cancer etc - but just allow me to wonder a moment!) supports
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
> Who, except for /. crowd, expects Microsoft adopts Linux for one of their strategic pieces?
> Windows has the HAL that can absorb hardware differences, so there's no room for Linux and the
> like.
When the Mac came out in '84, M$ told the DOS heads that using their keyboard macros was so much faster than using a mouse that using the mouse and gui will never make it into mainstream business. They published statistics to prove it. Then Windows came out, and M$ told them how great the mouse and gui was, and they switched over in droves, their past biases completely removed from their memory banks.
When the web started taking off in the early '90s, M$ told the faithful that the web was a waste of time. It was run by Universities and will never be applicable to the modern business world. Hell, you had to jump through hoops to even get windows running TCP/IP back then. Then M$ came out with IE, and told everyone that it is the business app of the future. All of the windows heads developed mass amnesia, and told us all how M$ runs the internet.
History says that if M$ changed their stance and started pushing Linux, embrased and extended into proprietary hell, of course, then all the current Linux haters will tell you how great M$ Linux is, and forget they ever bashed it.
M$s main power is brainwashing. They coddle the non-free-thinking masses and give them a sense of community in their M$ness. They will blindly follow whatever Redmond tells them, as long as they have Linux and Apple or whoever to despise. Hated is the easiest way to bind any community.
jfs
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Just because MS doesn't have a monopoly in every single market (yet), doesn't mean they don't have a monopoly. The problem with the xbox is that they are using the billions of dollars they made from their OS monopoly to push their way into other markets.