Prepping For The 360

An anonymous reader writes "The Xbox 360 launches on Tuesday, and ZDNet talks to some of the folks who are already prepping for it. John Dvorak also has commentary on the new console, and he seems to like it." From the Dvorak article: "Luckily Microsoft's Xbox 360 crew, and other game developers, are working on cool stuff that will cross over to PCs. When game developers retake their rightful place on top of the hill of progress, we'll all be better off. Needless to say, I am impressed by the Xbox 360. The Xbox 360 explores new menu structures with a unique and pleasant GUI. One often-overlooked element that the Microsoft games group brings to the party is its unique GUIs that are unlike the folder/desktop metaphor that Xerox and Apple developed."

Comments

Long Tail media center

[BWJones]

Chris Anderson also got one early and is interested in the Xboox 360 from a Long Tail perspective as a media center.

Re:Long Tail media center

[ergo98]

Using the Xbox as a media center makes possible lots of new channels for media access that are currently unavailable with present distribution methods.

What "new channel" for media access does it provide that isn't provided by every cheap computer already out there across the nation? It's yet another computer device - BFD. Your dramatization about it is as laughable as the originators.

Chris Anderson has helped popularize the concept of the Long Tail by coining the phrase back in 2004. I sent you to the source with my link. Perhaps reading available information and studying a bit of statistics before you post will help you to understand a bit more than you currently appear to.

Ouch! Zing! You're good, and that burned me good. Wait, no it didn't. And yes, it's a trite, overused saying that the originator is cashing in on at every opportunity, and all of the hanger-ons are repeating like some sort of mantra (when really it's a ridiculous simplification that's often, quite simply, wrong. 99.9% of xbox360 owners will never use it to express the "long tail" advantage).

Anyways, get back to your kool-aid.

360 is impressive, has potential, but needs time

[Coopjust]

The Xbox 360 is undoubtably a monster of a machine, and one that Microsoft naturally takes much pride in. But Microsoft is going to be in the red for a while, and they will need to make the money back. Once the gaming base gets them up and out, my guess is that major innovation will start to keep buyers away from the PS3 and Gamecube (which shouldn't be too hard-the estimated cost per cell chip is stellar (theinquirer.net) and Nintendo has an undeserved reputation as merely a "kiddy" system.) If they can do that, the 360 will profit. Microsoft will pretty much be forced to innovate, and consumers should win this battle.

Who cares what Dvorak thinks

[CokeBear]

Why should anyone care what Dvorak thinks? He is usually wrong in his technology predictions. He has consistantly, for the past 20 years, predicted the demise of Apple, and he hated the iPod, thinking it was a dumb idea when the first one came out. JCD is a shill for Microsoft, and not a very interesting one at that.

One Thing I Like

[MBCook]

I'm not planning on buying one yet (too expensive, no killer app for me yet), but i must say that I like the way they implemented custom soundtracks. On the XBox you could listen to your music in games (PGR2, for example) but you had to rip your CDs to the XBox hard drive. I've already done that to my computer's hard drive. I wasn't going to go rip my entire collection again onto my XBox. But with the 360 it can stream it off your computer from what I understand, or better yet you can hook up your iPod by USB and listen to the (non copy-protected) songs off that. When I played PGR 2 I turned off the music and put my iPod earphones in my ears and listened to my music while playing the games. Now I can do that without the earphones. I think that is great.

I don't know if the 360 can read the playlist info, but that would be even better. I doubt it (Apple wouldn't tell 'em, they'd have to reverse engineer it).

But this ability is a great little feature. It takes something that was too hard to use on the XBox (because of having to rerip my CDs) and makes it easily available.

Re:One Thing I Like

[Saige]

Yes, the 360 can read the playlist info right off the iPod. Heck, it even knows what you've named your iPod. I got to play with it back at the end of August, and everything was handled wonderfully with the iPod.

Page View Pumping

[GeekTek]

Excuse the potential flame-bait, but hasn't there been an inordinate number of Dvorak articles posted in the last few months? Most of us wrote him off as a puffed up windbag years ago, why has he popped into relevance at this point?

Dvorak has a long long history (see post circa '95 above) of writing asinine articles that are just plain wrong. And I'm not talking about 'hindsight 20/20' wrong - I mean predictions which make me wonder if he's in the same industry that we all are in.

Anyway, it seems like the /. crowd is giving this guy FAR too much credit and FAR too many page views. Which leads me to the inevitable question - why has this article been posted by an AC?

With online advertising spending at an all time high (and growing at absurd rates), maybe it's time for the editors to be a little more discriminating before rewarding mediocrity with tens of thousands of impressions.

Re:GUI??

[steeviant]

Yeah, that was awful of him to meet with Newton and take credit for a bunch of his work.

I don't think Apple have ever been particularly secretive about the origins of the GUI -feel free to correct me if you can point to an instance where Apple have claimed to invent the GUI, as far as I can tell they only took credit for Mac OS.

Notably, there was a significant amount of apple stock transferred to Xerox PARC, who were unwilling to make a commercial product out out of the Star and Alto GUI systems, what with being a RESEARCH centre and all. Laser printing and Ethernet are other examples of now-ubiquitous technology that PARC failed to capitalise on were they "stolen" as well?

In fact, several key engineers from PARC left Apple so that they could take advantage of the opportunity to be on the team that brought the GUI to the masses.

Finally, have you ever seen what Xerox's GUI looked like? There's no more similarity between the interface of the Star and Mac GUIs than there is between DOS and UNIX, that is to say superficial resemblance only. Drop down menus, drag and drop, double-clicking and many other features that are standard fare on todays computer interfaces originated at Apple, not PARC, though quite probably from the same people.

It'd be nice if people would stick to talking about things they actually have a clue about instead of spreading nonsense about how they would like history to have been.

I suppose you think Bill Gates invented the personal computer industry and Linus Torvalds stole all the code in Linux from SCO as well.