Slashdot Mirror
360 Wireless Clashing With Wal-Mart Tech
vladcole writes "Xbox 360 kiosks are getting shut down by some Wal-Mart employees sick of having their handheld inventory devices and printers malfunction, according to this compilation of Joystiq reader reports." From the article: "There's no reason to get worried about the Xbox 360 launch date (there, we recognized the elephant in the room), but the breadth and frequency of these reports point to a compatibility issue between the Xbox 360 and Wal-Mart, at least." Next Generation confirms that Wal-Mart is having issues with the 360 pods.
I would think the reason stuff like that is happening is because they are preproduction models. They may not have done things like figuring out the shielding and stuff, so there could be quite a bit of RF interference coming from them. Once it gets past the regulatory agencies and such, it should not produce any more interference than any other electronic device. It's actually quite amazing how much RFI a poorly shielded computer can produce, so it's not surprising their wireless scanners are getting knocked out.
What the Slashdot article neglects to mention is that Microsoft has already fixed the problem .
They had a fix within 24 hours and started rolling it out. It didn't affect wireless networks in general, only some specific point-of-sale systems.
Anyhow, to sum up, problem was fixed before launch and wouldn't have affected consumers anyhow.
Here are some pictures for those of you interested.. The Wal Mart down the road from my house Phillipsburg, NJ