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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."
It's Windows 2000. What a shock, who would've guessed, I'm so exci..... ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
DOS
What's next? Next thing you know Apple will start using Intel chips instead. Strange days. :)
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
My guess is faeries. They captured a whole mess of them and have chained them to tiny little switchboards in the machine. I was going to say leprachauns, but the extra gold they carry around would make the machines too heavy.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
What would you run on it? The XBox was cobbled together from basically off the shelf hardware. 4 years down the line, and we still haven't gotten everything working with Linux yet. The XBox 360 has NO OFF THE SHELF HARDWARE. You would need to reverse engineer the processor, graphics processor, RAM, filesystem, and system bus, not to mention audio, usb and IR controllers. I won't even go into the rights management system, which I imagine can only be stronger than on the original XBox (2048 bit encryption key needed to boot the XBox 1) Then you would have to write your own APIs and compilers for accessing said devices. I don't think the OS is the biggest problem in terms of hackability right now.
Thanks for ruining that movie for me, you insensitive clod!
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XBox was a 400$+ Million Loss Leader.
Anyone else know how to spell 'monopoly'?
My little site.
I guess my point is : if the dev kits are using G4's PowerPC, does it make the console easier to crack ?
The OS is rather irrelevant when you're talking about embedded systems or for that matter, any system which just does its designed tasks with little direct human interaction.
... but let's be honest here. A lot of pretty darn important systems run on Windows, despite all the complaints about it being "insecure". There's a strong 3rd. party market happy to try to shore up those holes for a price - and plenty of customers willing to pay for those "improvements".)
... as long as it keeps running, people don't care what it runs.
That's why, as long as they keep on reading your ATM card and spitting out money properly, most people don't care a whole lot which OS their ATM machine runs.
The only reason we really have "OS wars" today is because people have differing opinions on the way things should be presented on the screen to them as an interactive user of said OS. (And secondarily, technical debates on such things as security
Most of the time, when someone expresses a strong preference for Mac OS X, they're really expressing a fondness for the overall look and feel of the GUI.... Perhaps they favor the drap and drop nature of everything, with file management being done by symbolic folders that automatically open up when you hold the mouse button down while pointing at one? Maybe OS X Tiger users just fell in love with the Dashboard widgets or the Spotlight search feature, or who knows?
Same with any other OS I can think of. Even MS-DOS users argued for it because of it's stark simplicity. "Only one exact way to do a specific task... no confusion of "What does the picture on my screen do that looks like *this*?" Easy to write down a step-by-step instruction sheet so anyone who can type can get a task done in it.
None of these things really matter on a system that nobody interfaces with directly very often. If it just serves up web pages or files or acts as a back-end to a database, or whatever
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.