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.
Wal-Mart has some of the best tech in retail, actually. Just because they *sell* cheap crap doesn't mean they *use* cheap crap.
If you want to know what other retailers will be doing in 5 years, take a look at Wal-Mart's tech. There's a reason people are willing to work in their tech group for the low wages - it's because they learn a LOT.
All other valid slams on Wal-Mart aside, their tech is most definitely good stuff.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
the 360's communicate via airborn chair transmission. Some stray chairs are bound to hit the odd bystander.
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.
In the same way that a cordless telephone may interfere with your WiFi, this is allowed to happen. When anyone is free to make anything use that band, stuff like this is bound to happen. It really isn't that bad. This is one reason why it is nice to have licensed frequencies where people can't go messing around (ex: FM and AM don't have that problem because they are protected).
In short, yes they are allowed to do that. Now I find it STUPID that this system wasn't tested before rolling out. I can't believe that if it was tested that they would miss such a problem.
Now if they used wired controllers (they are permanently attached so that shouldn't be a problem) then I would think that would solve it (WiFi is optional on the 360, IIRC). Now if doing that they STILL had problems, then I would start looking into if they really comply with Part 15.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
And 3 years from now, your PC will not only play Call of Duty 2 at ultra high, but whatever other games you want which look even better.
Assuming your CPU is still fast enough and you spend another $300 on a new graphics card.
360 will be stuck with whatever it could play when it came out.
And your computer will magically get faster over the next three years? Games on consoles do tend to get better over the life of the console as developers gain experience with the console. It is much easier to optimize for a fixed platform.