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Allard 'Gets Real' With IGN
schnikies79 writes "In an interview with IGN, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President Chief Architect J. Allard said he wants to work with competitors on the XBox 360. From the interview: 'I'm pro consumer on this one to the end,' says Allard. 'Anybody in my company who thought this was a bad idea to plug in Sony or Apple devices into this thing, I ended that conversation pretty quickly. This is the right thing to do for consumers. Once they invest $500 in their digital media library, you can't ask them to go buy a 360 music player and a 360 digital camera, and a 360...NO! They got their stuff. They're going to want to plug it in. We're going to be open here, guys. And if anything, I wish we could be more cooperative with the other companies that are doing those things. And if Sony or Apple were to call me up and say, "Hey, we want to some special things with the 360," I'm on it. I think it would not be in anybody's interest to say, we're not going to work with 360. It's good for them, it's good for us, and it's good for consumers.'"
"They're being a little sloppy with the CPU, they're being a little sloppy with the discs, they're being a little sloppy with their formats and compression to make launch."
Wow man, thanks for pushing me to the other side of the fence on the "Buy a 360" or not question.
Seriously though, I played one at Walmart the other day, and the Kong game had terrible aliasing problems. Edges on most everything looked very, very blocky, and I was surprised they put the game out there looking like that.
How about the numerous tests, both independent and Microsoft-sponsored that show iPods and PSP's interfacing with the 360?
As long as the iPod has its mp3's stored in the iPod's mass storage area (in other words, so you can't actually play them through the iPod) and they actually are mp3's, and not DRM'd AAC files from the iTunes Music Store.
For both of these reasons, the 360's "iPod support" is completely useless. You can't buy a song from Apple, sync your iPod with your PC, then connect it to the 360 and play those songs. You can't even do it with your own ripped files from CD, unless you manually drag them over to a folder on your iPod, which your iPod then doesn't even know exists (but the Xbox 360 does).
The PSP support is probably different, because as I understand it, with the PSP you just dump a bunch of mp3 files into a folder and it plays them. Still, there's nothing revolutionary about being able to get these files off there. It's just transferring a bunch of files from one device to another.
which is worse: drm or a microsoft product?
That's a bit of a false dichotomy -- do you seriously think that M$ won't sneak DRM in there?
My sig is too lon
My information says that project 42 was disbanded in May 1999, which is when Allard left. But you are correct in that Project 42 is a predecessor to .NET, which was promoted at Forum 2000.
Tristan Yates
Everytime I've seen Live it looks like nothing more than a glorified chat room that acts as a gaming hub. The single sign-in for all games is a nice features but Sony and Nintendo will have something simiular. Past interviews with Nintendo have mentioned it, and you can be sure Sony is researching it.
Other than that Live is a pretty big let done when compared to what even the PS2's online mode in Japan can do. You can download movies, music, pictures, and short games/demos and watch, listen, view, or play them. I also already interfaces with Sony cameras for viewing pictures so nothing really big there.
You can see what the rest of the world missed here http://bungiefan.tripod.com/psbbn_03-06.html
>PS3's big plus over the xbox is Blu-ray (if it takes off). However, if the >telco and cable company's multi-billion dollar push for streaming high def >video over the web takes off, then hd-dvd and lu-ray will become obsolete >before they hit shelfs... only good for storage.
And how does this make a bad choice for the PS3 and a good choice for the 360? First off in the coming 1-2 years not every place will be able to stream this HD video off the web as some places in the US are unable to get broadband. Secondly that still doesn't make MS sticking with a 9GB disk when you are trying to load up with HD content a good idea. So the disks become only good for storage, you'll get a lot of it on that one disk. Gamecube games suffered from only being 1.5GB in some games where the video and audio had to be more highly compressed, will the 360 suffer this fate because as Allard said "the compression isn't there yet".
>I don't know who will win this round, but right now my money is on the xbox. >Sony is loosing allot more money then MS is on each console, and the console is >really that more powerful, at least according to the dozens of developers I've >talked to/ worked with. I personally haven't developed for either yet, but >anticipate I will sometime next year. The developers I talked too aren't in >love with the cell at all. Apparently you really can't use all the cores the >way you would expect.
I'm not trying to be a fan boy but I can't see Sony losing all the much more than MS. Sony as the manufacturing plants to make the parts themselves. As for talking to developers I spoke in person with a friend who is currently doing testing for Activision (I won't say his exact position because they are only a handful of them) but he's not a beta tester. His comments where than it doesn't look any better than a high-end PC. Look at the PC when the PC and Xbox came out. The graphics were far better than the consoles, sure now years later those old PCs can't keep up, but look at what the new ones can dish out compared to the consoles.
As for the cell being hard to program for? We heard the exact some complaint with the PS2. Boo fucking hoo. Take a wild guess which console had the most games released for it? That's right the PS2, developers will release on which ever console has the largest user base. And remember that the 1 year head start didn't help the dreamcast.
>I'm going to buy both consoles, but I'm really not the average user... it will >be interesting to see how sony handles xbox's initial success this year.
I'll hold my judgement on the 360's initial success until after the smoke clears from the holiday season. As for consoles, I'll probably pickup a PS3 after the first price drop or a nice bundled game with a good coupon, and a Revolution right awa
I'm pretty sure Slashdot hasn't been around for 2-3 decades ...
I take it you contributed work to OpenOffice.org's .doc loading support? Because otherwise you wouldn't use the word "us", right?
WTF? XML is XML. Microsoft isn't trying to get you to use square brackets instead of angle brackets. Sure, they may define different schemas for different purposes, but a) so does everyone else, and b) the XML standard allows and encourages you to do so.
Interestingly, the best way to get you to buy their stuff so they can show a profit is by making it into something you want to buy. Maybe it's only caring about the user by happenstance, but it still amounts to the same thing.
Firewire won't be built-in, but USB will. As for browsing your files, that depends. See, the Xbox360 is trying to be a media center as well as a game machine. Thus, it may browse your image or music files, but don't expect it to know what to do with a .doc or a Linux executable. Also, this is a one-way connection. The Xbox360 can read data off of these devices, but it can't put data back on. Don't expect to be able to fill up your iPod with songs from your Xbox360.
And for the record, it's a $400 piece of plastic (or $300, if you buy the core system without a hard drive), and $60 games (except from Microsoft, who've said their games will continue to be in the $40-$50 range; it's only EA who has confirmed the $60 price point). As for what I would expect? How about the ability to play games? Anything else is just extra, since this is still a game system at its heart.
Then again, I'm sure I've just been trolled.
The iPod just uses a hidden folder called iPod_Control that stores all the MP3s. There's no special "mass storage area" because it's all one big HFS+/FAT32 drive, so anything that cares to look for the folder can scan through it and see all the MP3s. What's more, the hidden iPod database file format is fairly well known at this point, so there's no reason that Microsoft couldn't open the DB file and display all your playlists exactly as the iPod does. Furthermore, it will actually play AAC files - you're correct in saying "not DRMed AAC files from the iTMS), but I'm actually rather impressed they added unencrypted AAC support.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.