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

Hmmm... Dvorak Must Have Been Reading My...

[eno2001]

...posts on Slashdot for the past few years. I've stated MANY times that computers are NOT for business. The fact that they have been co-opted and philosophically monopolized by business is what keeps progress from happening. I remember way back when I made the move from Macintosh to Win31. The first thing I thought to myself was, "why isn't Microsoft paying attention to the people who really matter: the creative people like musicians and artists"? I went so far as to write them a letter saying that I understand their need to focus on the business angle, but in this day and age business is far less important than actually producing a REAL product. And the people who do that are creatives. I never got a response back. I still stuck with them until my horrendous experiences with Win95 and NT4. I was still hoping that they'd taken creative applications seriously and I found that music software designers were STILL having to create their own interfaces and APIs to tackle the job of making music on a PC. Completely counter to the way things should work. I found out that you only had access to 16 MIDI ports max in Win95 because they were still using the buggy 16-bit MIDI kludge from Win31. That, and my travails in trying to get NT4 working nicely with my pro audio gear are what made me realize that Microsoft didn't "get it".

Windows XP is a bit of on improvement but I've already moved completely to Linux and the Linux audio scene is FAR better than the Windows audio scene. So they lost me. All because they were willing to focus on boring things like spreadsheets and end-user DBs in Access. Completely idiotic. Dvorak is right. The REAL developments come from the gaming end of things because that's where I've seen most of the new and innovative features that actually MEAN something. Too bad MS. It was too little and way too late for a lot of us. Now we all use Linux. Good night.