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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.
Am I the only one who has doubts in the way that Wal-Mart runs their tech department? The junk they sell is probably just malfunctioning due to user error :P
Something Microsoft makes is screwing stuff up? STOP THE PRESSES!
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
I was with Microsoft through all the other fuck ups this year, but this is just too much.
I'll wait for 360s to arrive in people's houses for real before I might pick one up. And after hearing so many reports of how bad the demo games are looking, it may be better, and cheaper, just to pick up a new card for my computer to play Call of Duty and Oblivion.
It's like Microsoft is trying to make me not buy a 360 - and they succeeded.
Uh...no.
The three core 3.2Ghz CPU in the 360 looks to be roughly on par with a dual 2.5Ghz 970. The word that keeps coming up from developers working on the 360 is 'bottleneck'. It sounds like IBM really didn't put any effort into the 360 CPU and that Microsoft just wanted something with high Ghz numbers and more cores. But it is turning out that there is a huge difference between the theoretical and real world performance.
And after all the hype about the 360 GPU and now that most developers have had at least six months with at least underclocked versions of it, we are seeing huge numbers of 360 games look worse than pc games running on even NVidia 6800s.
The 360 would be a horrible choice for a pc gamer. The 360 has the terrible distinction of being the first console to ever have WORSE graphics compared to existing pcs. That is an amazingly bad accomplishment for Microsoft.
Until it is confirmed that this issue has been resolved I suggest that everyone should avoid giving (money towards) an XBox 360 for the Penny-Arcade Child's play charity. It sucks, but hospitals have very strict requirements on interference caused by consumer electronics; it would be better that any donations go towards something that can actually be used by children in the hospitals.