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Xbox 360 Very Unstable
fmwap writes "There have been several postings over at Xbox-scene complaining of crashing Xbox's on new games, with default settings on single player. Crashes on Xbox Live and on startup have been reported too, and Project Gotham Racing 3 crashes before finishing the first lap. Screenshots and Video are available showing the crash."
Does anyone know if these things are upgradable? or what the process is? Microsoft has a history of being first to markwt with buggy software. In the past it has been a strategy which has worked for them. Still, I long for the days of cartridges. Just reminissing - please don't flame me. But do answer if you know about upgradability/
So half a dozen out of the hundreds of thousands of new Xbox 360 owners are having problems. Why does Slashdot have to state "Xbox 360 Very Unstable"? I've had bad installs of Linux too. Would we see the headline on Slashdot "Linux Very Unstable" too?
This is normal. With the massive number of parts in the Xbox 360, it's to be expected that some are defective on a few units. Microsoft will give them a replacement. Move along, nothing to see here.
This is why I never buy technology when it is first released on the market...
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
You won't be getting a dollar from me then. If this is a big hardware problem I feel bad for the developers who had to work long hours to get their product ready for launch date.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27893
80 or 110W CPU (I have heard both ways), a GPU equivalent to the ~100W R520, a HD, RAM and a constantly spinning DVD in a box how big?
And people wonder why they crash. Anyone who has one want to comment on how hot they get?
-Charlie
... You know they won't. The problem with today's software (and combined hardware/software) manufacturers and vendors has nothing to do with the programmers themselves. Companies have simply responded to the paying public's demand for new toys with no wait. We want our toys NOW, not later. And buying trends for YEARS now have indicated that computer and computer program buyers are more then willing to purchase a program and then spend a significant amout of time patching and updating it- often right out of the box.
Microsoft responded to this in the way that gained them the most extra profit- they rushed the system to market without (apparently enough) random batch testing or other beta testing. People (lots and lots of people) bought the systems. They are crashing. Microsoft will now start to release patches (probably over Live) that correct this bug or that. The paying public will accept this and install them. People who buy XBox 360s down the road will expect the patches to be installed before they buy the system- but they'll still expect to have to install more at some point.
It's NOT the computer companies fault things have grown this way. They- like all companies- are a FOR-PROFIT venture, and will do whatever they think is the thing that will garner them the most profit. Period.
Welcome to Capitalism, enjoy your stay.
We whine when they delay and push back release dates of their OS over and over again but when they finally do come out with something "on time" (whatever that means) and it's not up to par we give them shit.
;)
So they can't win. Everyone knew that already but seriously it's not going to cost them anything.
Consider their "limited release numbers" early adoption beta testing. They got them out there into the real world without having to give the units away and now they are getting the feedback they need to add to the new "revisions" that will still be out before the PS3.
It's a good thing though, the *only* reason I could ever see purchasing an XBox with Live would be for racing online. Now that I can't do that I might as well wait for Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3 w/o network play
Is that all it takes?
I would hope people would take more of a wait and see approach to see how widespread the problem is.
somebody mod the parent post up.
At work we get large quantities of hard drives from various manufacturers and out of every batch we usually get 1 or 2 that just will not spin up, or have other errors prohibiting their use.
Considering the condition of some of the boxes I've seen people carrying out of the stores, it's no wonder there isn't a few machines that have had parts wriggle free.
They probably make sure the system boots to the dashboard and then send it on for packaging.
I seriously doubt that ANY video game console company does burn-in testing for 24-hours before shipping the unit to market. The costs would be (more) astronomical.
Well, I don't know about you, but if I buy systems with a *pre-installed* OS, no matter whether it's Linux or Windows or OS X or Plan 9 or whatever, I expect the system to be in a usable state. There is such a thing as quality control.
This is even more true when you consider that a console is not like a PC - from a customer's point of view at least, it's much closer to any regular home appliance. To give an example, if you bought a new toaster and it didn't work, would you then say "that's OK, it might not have worked if I had installed NetBSD on it myself, too"? I don't know about you, but if I buy a toaster, I kinda expect it to be able to produce toast. And if I buy a game console, I kinda expect to be able to play games.
And seriously, how many console models have you seen in your life that had this kind of failure after the initial launch? I've been buying consoles ever since the mid-80's, and I don't recall something like this happening ever, so I definitely would say that it *is* news indeed, in the truest sense of the word. Or is it just that it shouldn't be reported because it's Microsoft and you're a drooling fanboy who cries "M$ bashing! unfair! everytime he sees something that might be construed as being critical of M$?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
How can you call the XBOX 360 'very unstable', based purely on a couple of sporadic forum posts, by anonymous people with no real media credibility. While I'm certainly not saying they are fake, I am saying some people have an agenda. And frankly, it wouldn't surprise me if some "hyper-ultra anti MS zealots" that frequent this site would do such a thing purely for kicks and a lack of maturity, such is the nature of those with a religeous devotion to something. Also, who says these people havn't opened up the XBOX, had a fiddle, tried some modding etc...
Furthermore, with the exponentially increasing complexity of electronic products these days, it's to be expected that there will be some software bugs that need ironing out. A console as complex as the XBOX 360, with advanced networking features and a system such as Live will of course have some bugs to iron out. Microsoft will replace faulty units, because they wish the XBOX 360 to succeed and public outcry wouldn't be to there advantage.
Finally, When Slashdot posts an article about the XBOX 360 launch, with links to sites effectively praising the console as an excellent product, with respected sites such as [H]ardocp giving it the thumbs up, it's poor journalism to immediately follow up with an instability article with poor sources. Common sense tells me if the XBOX 360 was 'very unstable', sites such as [H]ardOCP and GameSpy who would be testing and evaluating it extensively would also have run into issues, yet I see no mention of this on their sites.
Very unstable? Rubbish. Editors need to be more responsible and ensure articles have an appropriate headline.
The graphics glitches in those screenshots look like what happens when a modern graphics card overheats. For some reason the contents of the video RAM tend to get corrupted (covered with checkerboard blocks or rainbow colors) right before the system halts altogether.
I don't have an Xbox, but maybe you could try running it with the cover off or a fan blowing on it?
I wonder why Sony takes it's time developing their console as opposed to rushing it out the door to try to gain marketshare like some other greedy corporation does
Are you suggesting Sony isn't some greedy corporation?
We whine when they delay and push back release dates of their OS over and over again but when they finally do come out with something "on time" (whatever that means) and it's not up to par we give them shit.
...
So they can't win.
Ahh, but they can win...it's called proper project management.
Delays can and do occur, but to be years off target is inexcusible. Rushing a product to market to meet the project deadline is also inexcusible. Microsoft has way too much experience in software development to not be able to estimate how long a project will take. When projects are chronically late by significant anounts of time, your means of estimating time to complete projects needs to be re-examined.
Longhorn is estaimated to ship when, 2008 is it? This is several years behind schedule? (I don't know for certain.) Microsoft's project manager knew (or whould have known) what was going into the new OS and the developers should have been better prepared to provide a more reasonable estimate of the time needed to complete the project.
Of course, the MS Marketing Dept. may be setting timelines and not the engineering/R&D department....no shock there.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Of course, they've also shown that they can win with their anti-competitive practises. Too bad there's not some sort of legal entity that will call them on it...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It sounds like either the dev kits weren't in sync with production units, or someone as MS decided to add a last minute DRM to the BIOS.
It sounds like you're just making shit up.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
And for what it's worth another poster has already pointed out that Sony had some issues with the PS2 and there were lawsuits over it. These things do happen once in a while, get the replacement and get over it.
This is reason #1 why I'm waiting about a year to buy a 360. For MS to work out most of the big bugs.I can't say I feel sorry for anyone who's experiencing these problems. It's a risk you take when you rush out to buy untested technology. It shouldn't be this way, but its a fact of technology life. If people wouldn't be so quick to go out and buy, maybe companies might start smartening up.
Other reasons include:
-My current X-Box currently still have lots of life left in it.
-Prices will go down.
-Won't have to stand in line to get one, or go from store to store.
-More selection of games.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Perhaps you could share with us your incredibly accurate estimation technique? I'm sure many of us would love to know how you've solved a problem that no-one else in the business has managed to solve effectively for years.
Seriously, estimation is hard. I'm sure you know that really. The best development shops I've worked for deal with this problem by having plans that can adapt to unexpected delays, including putting back the shipping date if necessary. Perhaps we're lucky; for some projects, that simply isn't an option. But it's a lot better than pretending you can estimate a project that's going to take hundreds of man-years accurately ahead of time, and then betting your business on being able to make your predicted shipping date.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It does seem to be a hardware problem - they crash screen look glitchy instead of the "clean" screen you get when the crash is OS related. Reminds me of and overheated GPU.
Now, i don't know if the headline is correct (the console is very unstable... but only for a bunch of people), but if true, it has the smell of a rushed product all over it. And i won't make any friends over this, but serves these people right. Yeah, you, the ones that couldn't wait a couple of months and pay 3x the price in order to buy a product before it has been properly reviewed. And i don't mean like Gamespot's "Oooh! It's the second coming of Christ"-kind of reviews.
Paying upfront for promises is bad buisness. Don't buy into the hype. It's only a console.
Why exactly are we modding up comments that are based purely on the random thoughts of some /. reader?
Here, I got something for you all to waste some +1 Insightfuls on:
I looks like some Sweatshop worker must have unsoldered the R15 line on 50% of their workload!
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Obviously they would have caught errors on this scale in testing. This must have been a manufacturing error, not a design error. That still doesn't let them off the hook. They are responsible for their quality control too. But I imagine they will iron this out shortly and offer full exchanges on returned units. Sony had similar issues with flimsy PSP's at launch too.
apparently team xbox started a poll. Very small sample but 15% of xbox 360's are freezing. It will be interesting to see what happens to the percentage as the sample grows.
Dude, if I had an X-Box and it was working properly, why would I be answering polls on some "team X-Box" site??? I'd be spending every waking hour (outside of work) playing Call of Duty 2 or something.
Frankly, I'm stunned that their number isn't far closer to 100%.
The real number of X-Boxes with problems is something we won't know for a couple weeks yet. It could be everybody, it could be a handful of loudmouths (or Sony astroturfers) trying to turn their bad experience into the next big consumer "crisis", a la the iPod battery "issues." Let's not get ahead of ourselves. If they screwed up the launch, we'll have plenty of time for MS-bashing fun when the dust settles.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
You're (potentially inadvertantly) equivocating profit with value. They are not necessarily the same thing. If a public company is required to make a good faith effort to increase shareholder value, such things as reputation and integrity can be more important for the long-term success/value of the company than near-term profit.
*sigh* back to work...
What we should be reporting on, what is MORE newsworthy than just the instability, is Microsoft's reaction to it. If and when they find the problem, will they replace defective units? It's usually at times like these that a company shows its true committment to its customers and product. As an example, when the iMac flat panel line first came out there were lots of customers complaining of fan noise, and Apple was quick to figure out what was causing it and send out replacement parts to affected users. My first Mac was an iMac with such a problem, and their reaction to the problem was entirely reassuring to someone who bought in on a 1.0 version of a product. I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye on the news of these issues to see what kind of support is there for people.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Wrong.
Forget your bias against Microsoft; the Xbox 360 design is far better than the PS3, which WILL BE A NIGHTMARE to debug.
Debugging is not the problem, the rush to market is to blame here, plain and simple.
As the other reply states, most of these initial games won't make use of multiple cores, anyway, but even so, multiple threads and processes are not really an issue, nor are they poorly understood by game developers. Games can make use of the multiple cores without much hassle, as long as the underlying libraries and compiler optimizations are clean... which is probably the major problem here - the 360 XDK is simply not that mature yet. Debugging is straightforward, and better still, done remotely, which, most of the time, results in cleaner steps through code in this sort of environment.
Synchronization isn't even that big of a deal, because even in a developer-optimized game, one thread (i.e. running on it's own core) will handle the rendering, the other will handle the housekeeping (disk I/O, user actions, networking, mesh/object manipulation, etc). Most of the time, the housekeeping will be waiting on the rendering. While the CPU arrangement is symmetrical, this doesn't really refer to running a single process, but rather the generic nature of code and memory access. PS3's Asymmetrical system, on the other hand, means games will have to be optimized to a larger degree by the developer, and MORE care is needed to prevent issues.
I also find it odd that a game would be released that can't make it through the first single player race... simple playtesting should have showed the bug well before launch. This smacks more of a hardware issue, which ANY multi-core system is likely to run into. Blame IBM for that problem, I guess.
Debugging is not the problem, the rush to market is to blame here, plain and simple.
I recall the original X-Box having similar issues when it was launched. BFD; Microsoft isn't exactly alone in releasing first, fixing later. They're probably not even the worst at the game.
At least with PC games, it's become par for the course that the game will be quite unstable until the 2nd or 3rd patch.
Most people I know won't deploy a new verision of Windows until the 1st service pack.
Welcome to the world of rushed releases of incredibly complex systems.
Engineer says: "How does it work?"
Manager says: "When will it work?"
Manager usually wins, engineer doesn't get his questions answered, and as a result there are bugs.
Leaving the customer to complain: "Why doesn't it work?"
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
We're taking components and cramming them in spaces with insufficient free air delivery and we're surprised when they crash and burn.
Consumer electronics should be designed to support consumer use, no?
A consumer should be able to use AV cabinet "A" and AV device "B" the way both were intended. If not, then one thing, the other, or both were poorly designed.
As a consumer, I would expect that any AV cabinet I buy is designed to accommodate or dissipate the heat from several devices consuming several amps each at 120 Volts. As a consumer, I would assume the X360 is designed to operate in reasonable temparture and humidity ranges, and also that it is designed to manage the BTUs it generates during operation. What exactly is wrong with this?
I've lost many hard drives and three computers (one Linux, one Mac and one Windows,) to "heat prostration".
I've owned and operated Macs, Wintel, and Linux boxen for almost 20 years, and I've run them on or under desks, and in closed, poorly ventilated "computer desk" cabinets. Not one has overheated, even the Mac that spent its entire 6 years as my main machine, in the closed cabinet, and had 3-4 HDDs at times.
Sometimes the cases are not really capable of handling everything we can shove in there.
Then why are we able to shove things in there? If there is a valid mounting position for something, the case designer should assume it's going to be used and design accordingly.
I hate the monolith in Redmond as much as the next guy but... heat is the enemy here.
I'm not specificly digging MS here, they just provided a context for the discussion. This is a fundemental design standard that all consumer products should meet, regardless of the product type or manufacturer.
Heat is not an enemy, it's a predictabe condition. In this case, MS could easily tell how many amps the box pulls, and could easily compute the BTUs it would be generating. From there it's a risk management question: What is an acceptable mean failure rate, and how hot can we let it operate before we exceed that rate?
I bet NOBODY who lives in a frozen food section at Safeway is reporting a crash.
And I bet NOBODY considers that a valid consumer electronics operting specification.
Have you *ever* written/debugged a multi-threaded program? Debugging a multithreaded program on three homogenous processors is a ton easier than debugging (essentially) a multithreaded program on a heterogenous set of processors (1 of one type and up to 8 of another type) that have to be accessed by DMA engines and the like. It's basically debugging multiple programs because of the different instruction streams but with the added complexity of the same address space sharing issues of multi-threaded applications. They will effectively be different programs (must be since the PPC and the SPUs are not the same ISA) but all sharing the same address space, complicated by the fact that a lot of the interaction must be handled by DMA engines. This isn't much different from debugging embedded systems that have been around for decades (one such system I used was a board with an embedded PPC with eight DSPs all on the same board called the MAP1310 from CSPI - look it up on google). It was difficult to program and is basically the Cell in 3 chips instead of just 1.
Also, you say "are used by low level liberaries (well debugged)" and quickly polish over any idea that maybe those "well debugged low level libraries" will be a nightmare to debug. If any of those low level libraries are threads of execution in their own right, as opposed to simply being "load this subroutine into a SPU, call it just like another routine only use basically a RPC, then unload that subroutine from the SPU" then they will be a bit harder to debug. I image that at least some of those SPU "low level libraries" will most likely be programs that run independently of the PPC core and routinely synchronize with the PPC thread(s) and if the amount of interaction between them is much (which it may well be), then it will be far harder to debug than your typical Linux box running multiple threads (on homogenous processor(s)).
It's a games console... it's supposed to be in the living room. If the designers couldn't figure out that bit and left it with a flaw where it didn't work in a normal living room, they deserve to be shot.
well, the real number is closer to 0.0001%, but apparently a few people did take a second to go on the forums to brag about their working xbox360 which is why it's only 85%. Think it's Cartman syndrome: got a cool new toy = gotta brag about it.
The people who paid $300+ for a non-working xbox360 have nothing better to do than to bitch about it online so that's where the 15% came from.
Just the fact that it's only 15% means there's very, very few people with broken xbox360s because when shit breaks the first thing the internet community does is bitch about it 24/7. If there was truly a lot of busted xbox360s out there then this number would be 100%.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
You have the makings of a successful IT manager.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Maybe, but it won't be. It'll be on kids' bedroom floors, or buried under a pile of DVDs and stinky T-shirts in some student's dorm room, because those sort of people make up a large part of its market. To design the product without taking into account the conditions in which it will typically be used, whether it's advisable to use it like that or not, would be very silly, and I'm sure the product designers had more sense than to overlook something so obvious in testing.