Slashdot Mirror
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."
Seems like they got 1699 Parts of the x-box to the market:
/ 156253
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/18
and it seems to be the same in other forums too:
http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=391764
..placing a book under one corner?
Wow, a Microsoft product is unstable. This is news!
Microsoft product crashes
Pope is discovered to be a Catholic
Family of bears accused of defecating in forested areas
what?!? No blue screen of death?
"You killed my yogurt!" --Fred Fredburger
Project Gotham Racing 3 crashes before finishing the first lap
Sounds like someone needs to improve their driving skills and stop blaming the system.
for every smirk on the /. readers' faces who read this article and have preached against Microsoft in the last few years.
but seriously.... 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...[/sarcasm]
I hope this costs Microsoft DEARLY
Get paid to code OSS
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 the new XBoxes are crashing...let's just hope they've addressed the problem of the XBox bursting into flames and killing you. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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
...where *did* you think all those Windows Millenium Edition licenses went?
Shenzhen Chuanghui Electronics Co...? http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/ 21/0539250&tid=118&tid=137
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
Well, this is why I always wait a few months before jumping on a console, if not a year. Nothing pisses me off more while I'm gaming than a crash.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
A customer.
Furthermore, "geek up" the product so the alpha-testers will wait in line for 18 hours and pay twice as much as for competitor's hardware for this "priviledge".
My frend's dreamcast used to crash too an I've heard about this in the xbox too... Microsoft Quality certified products :P
This story made me laugh out lound...even Microsoft's game console has a BSD!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Com'on, this is a bad hoax against Micro$oft. The screenshots are not even blue!
Million Dollar Screenshot
ME?! Is that you I smell! Get out of that Xbox THIS INSTANT!
These guys have a fairly big list going too.
8==8 Bones 8==8
...Dreamcast 2.0.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
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
dropping it on one corner from a height of about 3 ft?
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
This is Slashdot -- journalistic integrity is almost nonexistent. It would be nice if the editors were to reject stories submitted with misleading, exaggerated, or false headlines, but it seems doubtful that will ever happen. These stories are usually spun pretty shamelessly on the original newsources without the need to add more BS when posted here.
... 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.
You have to love the sheer audacity of posting a link to an MPEG on the Slashdot homepage.
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
No bug testing on a Microsoft product? *GASP* In all seriousness though, I equate this to SNES cartridges spontaneously erasing save game files. Bad product design will hurt the next generation sales.
Should have waited for Service Pack 1!
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.
For example, I have a day-of-release PS2 that's still going strong, and I never experienced any of the problems that were reported here and elsewhere with these units. In this case, I assume that my machine is the norm and not the exception, but if I based my opinion on the naysayers at the time it would appear that my PS2 would be in the minority of working units instead.
Haste makes waste.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
They did (at least with the first Xbox) make it easy to upgrade. I'm not sure how that will work with the Xbox 360s that don't have hard drives. When Halo 2 first came out it had a bug that caused it to stretch images on certain HDTV widescreens and you had to have Xbox Live to download the patch which fixed it. Lots of people were pretty mad there for a few weeks (including myself because true 16:9 was touted as a big new cool feature).
I've heard an unconfirmed rumor that Microsoft suspects that the XBox's are crashing because of the proximity of nearby Linux boxes. One employee, using an "open source detector", claimed to have established a 3-mile "Cloud of Evil" around a Red Hat server. The employee went on to say "This conclusively proves that Linux is a danger to our children". Steve Ballmer's statement (which was taped to a chair and thrown through a newsroom window) blamed Google.
Wonder how the people who paid thousands of bucks for an xbox on eBay are feeling right now?
;)
Always let the idiots storm the beaches first
Sony has had problems with the PS2... the first batch had a significant amount of CD/DVD drive failures; I had one, but sony eventually replaced it for free.
In fact, there has been a class action over the issue:
http://www.ps2settlement.com/
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Can someone decipher the long error message seen in many of the screenshots? I know it starts with "System" but that's pretty much it.
>> Project Gotham Racing 3 crashes before finishing the first lap
You're playing a racing game. You're gonna crash.
Planned lack of testing might have been a contributing factor to the decision to restrict the number of units sold at launch. I mean, if they new it was going to be the most gawd awfully bugged first revision in console gaming history, they could save a lot by having fewer machines to recall.
Well, I'm boycotting Sony, and now xbox is crashing like a windows95 machine or worse. I guess that means I'll be playing Zelda on my old super nintendo machine for a while.
Seriously, on face value, it doesn't look much like anyone is doing well lately in the tech sector, or at least in that sector that uses copy protection. While that is a broad statement, wouldn't it be odd to find out that DRM is causing the xbox to crash?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
....Need some hot coffee to help them deal with these problems?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
...I actually have a life that prevents me from sitting in a lawn chair in the rain all night outside Circuit City to buy a buggy POS game console made by a company who makes other very buggy products.
I understand what you're saying and to a certain extent I agree.
But give how common these problems are, doesn't it strike you as odd? This is almost like there was no testing at all, which doesn't make sense. The developers surely would have caught these weeks, if not months ago.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Much as I hate to resist the tempation to bash a certain monopolist corporation....
;) But I wouldn't expect these crashes to be flaws in the actual console itself (harware or embedded OS) but more likely immaturity in the dev process and accompanying SDKs due to radical architecture change and the rush to release first. So later games are likely to be better in this resepect.
Is it seriously Microsoft's fault that these crashes are occuring? Could it not be poor QA on the dev side? Of course if that were the case then is it due to poor QA in general or a lack of dev support...Which brings the circle back round to MS again....Oooh..Getting dizzy...
Considering the architecture in that little box o' tricks is way off of MS' normal experience (they've been an x86 house since NT4. And I'm deliberately ignoring Windows Mobile...), I wouldn't be suprised if the dev kits they supplied to the developers are less than perfect. This in turn would mean more bugs an instabilities will creep in hence these (oh so pleasing!) occurences.
Of course it's just speculation. I mean, I'm posting on Slashdot - you don't *really* expect me to research this, do you?
Still not gonna buy one though......
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Have you tried blowing on the DVD, and wiggling it around a bit?
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.
That is why they call it the Ex box.
Why are people so excited about the Xbox 360? Or PS3? It seems like this is some sort of vicious cycle and we are reverting back to the Atari 2600 days. We are more than happy to throw away the freedom and flexbility of playing games on our own personal systems for the chance to experience these developers games in their locked in solution where they control and dictate every facet of the game? Why are we so willing to buy into the marketing hype around a system that has had very little road testing? Only now once the NDAs have been lifted do we really see that this product has been sent out to the masses, not because it was ready, but because MS didn't want to miss the chance to beat its competitors to market and potentially miss a Christmas release date. *sigh*
I really wish we didn't buy into the hype so easily... We are such lemmings... Big business plays the tune and we happily follow behind consuming whatever crap they dish out.
My friend opened his up and got an error immediately. Turned it off.... and back on and got the same error. So he held down the power button for an extended period of time and YAY it fixed it somehow and he's not seen any errors since. So much for Quality Assurance. No reports of crashes yet though on the games.
How many game saves fit on the premium 360's hard drive after all the software updates?
You have to admit though. Those are some decent crash screens. Not unlike the screens you'd see when pulling out a Atari 2600 game cartridge with the power on. Hey wait, the crashes themselves look better than atari 2600 games. Oh no!
Hopefully it is just a small number of units, or Microsoft's spangly launch is so doomed.
Good point. You should improve the research behind your numbers as well. As of now, we do not know the extent of the problem, nor whether the problem gets better or worse with time, nor whether it is just "a half a dozen" who are experiencing the problem (e.g., how many were bought for Christmas presents and not even opened yet?). If it is a marginal hardware component, the problem will tend to get worse as the component ages.
...I wonder if maybe it's just hardware failures. Obviously we'll never know, but given that it's entirely feasible to buy one of these things with (for example) a fried ram chip, or a faulty dvd drive, I wonder if it's as simple as just the normal percentage of failed hardware you expect when buying any item of complex computer equipment?
Game dev and music blog
Well i think this is different sorry, buying an xbox is like buying a microwave or a stereo, you expect it to work all the time, as long as it is used as it should be. Comparing a new Xbox to a Linux install is like comparing a new car with one where you upgrade the motor with a home made one not necessarily conform for the car and expect it to work as reliable as before...
The difference is that consoles are a static gaming platform, and they're running a small batch of rigidly defined, non configurable software (the release titles).
/.'ers are being warned to stay away from the 360 until these bugs are ironed out.
This is about as easy as QA testing gets so there is absolutely no excuse for crashes of any kind on the release lineup.
More to the point, something like this is certainly newsworthy, especially in the Games section. Even without the Microsoft shadenfreude,
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.
I waited up all night in front of a Best Buy to get mine. I also purchased Project Gotham Racing 3 and Kameo. With both games, I've spent most of my time playing PGR3. I have not had one crash, and the only trace I've seen of it is on Kotaku.
As a note, the system is very thermally unstalbe. I have mine vertical, and every vent is needed. If you were to block any of the airholes for any reason, or to trap the air exiting via the rear of the sytsem, the system potentially could overheat. The exhaust was very high temperature when I checked it after an hour or two of PGR3.
My rig (for reference) was running at 720P for part of it, 1080i for the other part (to compare whose transcoder was better, my TV or the XBOX). I'm on XBOX live, and upon boot, the system updated itself and restarted. This could have been a critical update that fixed the problem that people are talking about.
All and all, I'm quite impressed with the hardware. The emulation works better with some XBOX games than others. For instance, Forza motorsport runs sluggishly on the 360, yet Dead or Alive 3 runs flawlessly.
The live marketplace is impressive. They have HD downloads available, such as music videos and trailers. In addition, you can download new games such as bejewled from Microsoft. There are also themes that can be purchased via live, and as Penny Arcade themes are available, many people should be able to get their themes for sale on Live.
If I see crashes, I'll repost. However, so far, after 10+ hours of operation, most of which with PGR3, I have no crashes or errors to report.
These crashed are propably on machines that weren't updated with the latest XBox360 Security Updates. Or maybe it were machines that infected with Sony's DRM?
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
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.
Guess the programmers' idea of using the buffer overflows built into the system to try to get some extra performance just didn't work out... And I'll 2nd the whole 'bursting into flames and killing you' sentiment.
The XBOX shipped with (no less than 3) critical flaws in its BIOS, allowing unsigned code to be ran provided that it was given the OK from signed media (I.E. Mechassault, SplinterCell, 007). Perhaps they will write cleaner code next time?
You're combining things here. There were 3 flaws in the boot code. This is MS' fault.
That has nothing to do with the overflows in those games. Unless MS wrote those games, they aren't responsible, unless they're auditing the code before signing it.
Ahem. The story did not say that it was a widespread problem, though there's no evidence to the contrary either. They said the boxes were very unstable. A crashing box, to me, seems very unstable. The only higher level of unstability would probably be spontaneous combustion, or perhaps explosion.
Perhaps you might want to take the 'read the story and then post' approach in the future.
It can often be quite a hassle getting a replacement for such a product. Not only that, but then there's the wait involved. And if they shipped one faulty unit, what's to say that a new unit won't be just as faulty?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
One Microsoft exec on G4 said "I don't see any reason you'd wait to buy it." Well, I did!
- Waiting for better games (Gun, Gears of War, Crackdown, Superman Returns, King Kong)
- Avoiding the inevitable first few rounds of hardware glitches and recalls
- Price breaks!
I'll be doing the same with the PS3. Caveat emptor!
I know, deep inside me, there's a Linux nut just waiting to be let out.
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?
It seems like this is the machine that gets all the crashes and other issues.
"I'm sorry, you'll need to contact the hardware manufacturer for that problem."
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
HA HA! Looking at all the gamers who walked away empty-handed after camping out all night, how about a *Double* Nelson? HA HA, HA HA! --Rob
Towards the Singularity.
For all we know, it could be just bad game programming.
.0.00 release should be trusted to be stable, wait for an update.
The biggest problem I have with Microsoft OSs is the security, maintainability and usability.
Under no circumstance do I believe that the NT line is unstable except for third party crap. Since 1998, I've had fewer BSODs with the NT-derived OSs than one every two years. The ones that I did get were actually because of bad hardware or a bad driver.
Besides, no
Let's say over the next two weeks there are 100 posts of people having problems. Out of the total number of people who are having these problems, how many will post online about it? Maybe 1%, but probably more like 0.1% - 0.5% if the complaint to problem ratio is similar to other industries. And that's with only 100 complaints... I bet there may be a lot more.
There could easily be ten thousand or more faulty XBoxes. We could be talking about a hardware, firmware or OS problem that may or may not occur in a high percentage of XBoxes over the next few months. It's an unknown, but it's good that these problems are being called out early so MS can figure out if it's just a few bad hardware components or something more serious. Seeing as the HDD is optional I doubt a bad one would cause many in-game crashes except while saving. Any crash would likely be when the system booted and tried to mount the partition.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
exactly how?? This is typical Monolith Quality Assurance for ya.
As you know, every post equates to One Billion people.
... I'd call that unstable.
Having several billion consoles crash
Agreed. As my screen name might indicate, I (like many people here) have a general distain for Microsoft products. Nevertheless, I'd be somewhat surprised if this was a widespread problem.
They just did a giant weekend demo for average geeks and members of the press. No widespread malfunction reports were coming from that event.
This -could- be a major f'k up, but it's probably a few faulty logic boards on a handful of devices. That's the price you pay for buying a brand new device with a brand new architecture.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Didn't the PS2 or something have some issue with the CD drive mechanism being faulty on a large number of them early on in it's life cycle?
BytesTemplar.com
You obviously don't understand how /. works. Post quickly with little content, slam Microsoft when possible, and duplicate the story as quickly as possible with no new content.
:)
Once you get the rules down it won't bother you so much.
Who knows, this could be a result of Microsoft rushing the hardware to make it in time for the holiday season.
In the case of PDZ, I'd question the stability of the game from the fact they were stamping the damn thing before running it through Microsoft's test regime. The problem is with both parties frankly, because if you're stamping it before final testing, the you probably didn't do your OWN testing to make sure things were working properly. Or, I bet Rare was biting its fingernails hoping Microsoft didn't find known issues.
Admittedly, this is version 1 of the 360. You can never find all the problems until a product is put out to market and widespread use finds all sorts of issues you never thought of. For all we know, some people having issues maybe have their 360 plugged into a dizzying array of power bars hooked up behind their home theaters. Power issue, maybe? Inadequate cooling? Time will tell.
In any case, I'm pretty glad I'm not an early adopter this go-around. I'm still considering picking one up, but I think I'll wait until the game library's a little less sports-heavy, and maybe for the 65nm chipped versions to hit the shelves.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
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?
How many units did they ship? How many have problems? What's the percentage of failure? Please, let's not give in to the 12 year olds freaking out on forums when they got a bad one. The squeeky wheel gets the oil, remember. There isn't a problem that affects all XBoxes. You have to expect a number of defective units.
Mine plays fine. I played it for probably 6 hours last night. I had no problems in PGR3, CoD2, or Kameo. Mine sits in a closed component rack that isn't good for airflow.
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.
Well we have this thing called the internet now. It actually allows us to talk in almost real time. News, rumours and porn can spread (pun!) at near light speed. When my family got our first Nintendo, it didn't work out of the box. We took it back, exchanged it for a new one. Of course, I didn't post it in my blog, submit it to news sites, take screen shots or even IM my brethren who also purchased one. Hardly any of these things were around/popular when the Dreamcast/PS2 were released, so it's little wonder that you didn't hear about similiar failures. Another thing, the 360s are much, much more complex than nintendos, game boys, ps2s and toasters. I have absolutely no doubt that the out of the box failure rate would be higher. Almost like comparing motorcycles to unicycles.
p.s. I'm far from an M$ fanboy, but I think you need to put this issue into perspective.
you figure the people posting their woes are probably furious. when you consider all the effort they seemed to put into getting their prized new gaming system early. i don't really feel bad for them, but i can understand they would be irrational after camping out in a parking lot for 24 hours to bring home a system that is buggy. personally i would not wait in a checkout line of 20 minutes to buy any game system, let alone camp in a parking lot.... but that's just me.
one day people will learn that being an early adopter means you take some risks. it's not like they were buying a cabbage patch kid. there are not really software updates for xbox or PS systems... right? you take what you get.
Most of the posts says that the console works great after several continous hours of playing. Only a few reported problems... it seems to me this is a /. overeaction.
DON'T STEAL MUSIC!
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'?
The Xbox smashing is also featured in an article by The Inquirer. They also wrote that Xbox geeks take this matter too serious. I just find it amazing how people go balistic over a toy like the Xbox.
In general, a company and/or the executives can get sued by the shareholders if profit isn't the primary goal.
More specifically, it's "shareholder value", which is pretty much profit except that you might disguise the profit from the IRS.
In addtion, there is the defective PSP LCD screen and the tray in the back can pop open shooting the disc at someone (people would expect at least some sort of quality control). There's also the entire PS2 DVDROM thing that someone else mentioned earlier (DVD drive failing after even a year is hardly acceptable). I agree with you in that these events *are* news. Which is why the RMA/replacements for the PSPs and the class action suit against Sony were mentioned here on Slashdot.
This is certainly NOT normal for the console industry. It IS par for the course for Microsoft Software though. Console users are not accustomed the 'release early, release often' practices that MS champions in the software industry.
You're assuming it's a hardware failure and that it can be fixed by a replacement; I assume it's a software failure that will be fixed with a Live update or a boot CD (which might require units to be swapped as to install at the factory, but nonetheless root cause is probably software).
Your acceptance of such failures is typical of most PC users and I think it's a shame that MS and others have managed to set your expectations so low. If more people were outraged when they had to reboot or had to restart programs perhaps quality would improve.
Bugs, or a manufacturing defect? Mine plays fine. Same game. Same OS. Same hardware. There will be units that ship with a defect. It happens on any product. Now with the Internet every 12 year old that feels personally wronged can jump from forum to forum to complain.
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.
Only problem is that it would be reduced to playing only UT2004, Doom 3, Enemy Territory, Quake 4 and a slew of Loki ports (from about 6 years ago).
Meh.
Seriously, though, Plan 9 is killer. Everything Unix should have been. Hardware support is pretty anemic, though. And no AMD64 port.
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?
Just like Windows is cheaper to run then Linux and that Windows out performs Linux in security and efficiency, and let me see that firefox is less secure then IE.
Microsoft is reputable for blaming the world on everything else but themselves and making themselves look good by blaintly lieing about the whole issue to work in their favor ...
Come on, its Microsoft have a bit of fun with this as I think its only fair that the anti-ms community gets at least this minor problem to relish in ... heck with all the media hype they have gernerated and the fact that they were pushing to get this system out in the market asap i think its only fair ...
XviD AVI3 60/motherboard/3260052289.xvid.avi
http://69.93.36.237.nyud.net:8090/xbox-scene/xbox
This is normal.
No, it's not. This isn't a case of the game developers not knowing what the target system is, having to deal with different configurations, etc.
This is a closed product end to end with software designed specifically for it. 1st party software is crashing, ffs. This isn't normal.
Twinstiq, game news
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
...is always an alpha release. So it''s not surprising that the XBox 360 is crashing.
There is such a thing as quality control.
That's where you're wrong. There is such a *concept* as quality control. In the computer world, quality control means that someone checks to make sure that there's no mayonaise in it.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
We salute you!
blah. should get netBSD up and then they'd be able to run text mode doom.
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea
me too - with regular PC hardware. clustering together off-the-shelf PCs (from e.g. compaq, HP, also random-company builds in the UK), ie buying them from the maker/reseller/whatever with 'the same spec' and expecting the whole bunch to work the same. 100 or so PCs delivered at a time - about 5 separate cluster builds have revealed about a 1 in 50 failure rate. HDs, boards, memory, whatever.
none of the vendors seem too surprised - they fess up replacements straight under warranty.
k e l l a r
My XB360 crashed multiple times playing Quake 4. Personally, I think its an over heating issue.
Since the machine is pretty loud I put it in my home-entairtainment cabinet, which it shares with a receiver, DVD player, and an old VHS. While the cabinet is relatively large, when I close the glass door and play the XB360 it gets very hot in there after playing (and I've been playing alot).
Quake 4 seems to really stress the XB360 out since there is an aggrevating amount of slow down in the game. Several times when Quake 4 got too hectic my XB360 froze up on me. After I felt how hot it is I took it out of the cabinet and so far (being since last night) I haven't had any problems with crahes so far.
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.
http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=392599
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.
Back to the subject of the Xbox. It's normal and expected to have a small number of defective machines - that's why they have a warranty. With the CPU, GPU, RAM for both, ROM for the OS, all of the various logic chips and the power supply involved - I'm surprised that anything that complex works at all half the time.
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
I was playing PGR3 and I hit the Dashboard button. The dashboard showed up, then the console froze. I hope this will not be a recurring incidence...
What was it all those posters above were saying about checking things before pushing them out the door...
Yup, not enough synergy in the leveraging of ROM bits, it'll get your z-buffer out of sync with your bit blitter every time. When will they learn?
Funny, I've been buying consoles since the Atari2600 and remember EVERY console having some kind of weird promblem at launch. It's more publicized now with the advent of the internet... but I even remember th Commodore64 having recalls.
cmon mods... wtf
-everphilski-
I saw mentions of overheating. Could the problem be a result of being one of the first mass-market products to include water cooling? Perhaps shipping the hardware introduced stress that caused unforseen issues with heat seals, or may have introduced cracks that let vapour through, etc?
Twinstiq, game news
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
Hrm, rushing a product to market... M$ engineering.... no, this doesn't surprise me at all
If I had mod points just now, you'd be recieving some. One of the most surprising things about the internet age is how it makes everything seem amazingly faulty. I think this is because of some expectation we have from the pre-internet days. Previously, when we'd hear about a half-dozen of an item going wrong, it'd be a half-dozen in our immediate neighbourhood, which would suggest a pretty big failure rate. Now we're still hearing about a half dozen going wrong, but that's a half-dozen in the whole internet, which represents a smaller failure rate.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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?
Uhh..do you know what is under the hood of the xbox360, what makes it tick, can you search google and find the answer to your problem immediately and apply a patch? A bad linux installation is *100%* your fault because you
1) are a moron who can't follow directions
2) have hardware problems unrelated to linux
3) don't know what you are talking about.
Have you ever subscrubed to LKML? Do you know how much testing goes into a certain patch or the kernel before it is released as stable? A new minor minor kernel is released every ~2 weeks. Will linux catch on fire and kill you slowly due to smoke inhalation? Don't even try to compare that trashy xbox hardware to the linux OS.
Well if you need more anecdotal evidence, mine's fine. I've been playing a lot of Kameo, PGR3 & some arcade games, no issues.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Good thing someone had the balls to come in here and say it. Someone further up also made the comment comparing MS to Sony and said that Microsoft simply rushed the product to market to get it out there before the PS3. On Slashdot, when the other players bring products to market first (Apple, Sony, etc.), MS is accused of being 'behind the game', or just watching to feel out the market first. To that I say, "well, duh!". Whether the company launches quickly or slowly, it's called STRATEGY. Be assured that it's thoroughly calculated. In this particular case, the launch of Halo 3 is probably more heavily weighted than the launch of the 360 itself. Therefore, in order to time the Halo 3 launch to preempt the PS3 launch, MS probably measured how long the 360 would have to be available for it to saturate enough of the market for the Halo 3 launch to actually have maximum effect towards its goal of preempting the PS3 launch.
I find this all very odd, it crashes so horribly and frequently, why is it then that MS held a big shindig in the desert and people waited around forever all while playing the new xbox 360 and you never heard of this once. And if project gotham racing crashes on the first race well how did any of the reviewers capture the game for all of the video i have seen. I watched G4 last night just to see all the people who were waiting like starwars fans, and not one of the live videos of game play i saw had any lockups or crashes, unless the crash caused the game to continue its play and the users were randomely hitting buttons in order to try and unlock it, sorta like when you move the mouse around and chaoticly type on the keyboard when your MS OS locks. I have to say I have had an xbox and only had one lock up that I can remember and it was on the new mech commander. I look forward to getting my 360 that is on order because i like awesome games. As for nintendo, they suck, the graphics in there games are so kiddy it bores my 5 year old son. The only reason they survive to this day is that parents buy there low priced console for kids and the fact that until the psp they had the big handle on the hand held market. Honestly I dispise MS as much as the next /.er, but I have to admit that the console they have made does give sony a run for its money. I own both and in recent days find myself using my xbox more due to graphics. It is one hot little bastard, in fact I think it runs hotter than my pc, whereas my ps2 is hooked to my video multiswitch and has not been turned off in 2 years and still runs smoothly. I admit I would never trust my xbox to do this. I can however say that in the market the games MS has created have some of the best graphics I have seen, and I hope they continue to try and set a standard for gaming.
So in the end what I mean to say is, if you are a real console gamer you will buy both xbox and ps. If you want to hate ms, hate them for everything not Xbox.
Let the /. abomination and verbal beating begin...
Is this a first?
Is Microsoft's Xbox the first console to lock up like this?
I've searched everywhere and haven't found a precident.
Could Microsoft go down in history to be the first console maker to release a console the way vendors have been releasing software for years?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
You know, I thought this was a joke, until I read a few of the related links on the Reg. This is serious stuff, isn't it? These things really had bad power supplies and frequent line voltage level problems??? (of course, Europeans use 220 instead of 110)
Ow. "RUN AWAY!!!"
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
Smash my xbox 360
Ahh, that explains it. I bet they were going to keep it*, then realised that it just crashed anyway, and decided to do the smash.
*nah, I did not doubt them actually.
Dvorak on Doomtech
Perfect Dark Zero locked up for me during the first mission and I got a funky error message and got kicked out of PGR3 with it claiming my disk was the wrong region. Not a real good first impression!
> 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.
If you buy something expecting that your instance of it will definately work properly first time then you're a fool. There's a difference between a design fault such that most/all of them will crash within 30 mins, and the odd poorly assembled/tested product. A small percentage of *every* product is going to fail, such is the nature of mass produced commodity items, and that even includes your beloved PC with a *pre-installed* (nice asterisks, by the way) OS! There's not a bunch of guys who play test every xbox 360 for a couple of hours before it's shipped. Please don't tell me you thought there were....
Windows locked. oi the irony.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Maybe launched it in the US first as US gamers are more likely to forgive Microsoft for this (it's a US company). If they had launched in Japan first it would have completely flopped if these problems had occured there.
Personally what I put this down to is a very minor change in the hardware, different RAM chips or something. It might be that the games companies took shipment of their test units a long time back and these were using some very slightly different components or board design.
"This is Slashdot -- journalistic integrity is almost nonexistent."
Not to defend the editors here, but considering the scope of gleeful replies to this thread, this is the type of story that Slashdot's most vocal and rabidly biased posters are looking for. The Slashdot guys are "doing their jobs" in this regard.
Anyone who expects every single device sold to function without a glitch obviously hasn't spent any time servicing hardware or paying attention to prior console releases.
Besides, no .0.00 release should be trusted to be stable, wait for an update.
:\
What a bunch of crap! You can say that about software but not about a console that costs you a couple of hundred dollars. They should get it right the first time.
Oh wait, I forgot, we're talking about MICROSOFT here.
Reality has a notoriously liberal bias -- Stephen Colbert
No reason to do otherwise. If your program tramples memory or whatever, it crashes even in user mode. Having applications in user mode is to protect them from *other* applications behaving badly, not to protect from themselves behaving badly.
Since consoles run a single application at a time, there is pratically no reason to separate user and kernel mode. Also in comparison with other consoles (on the PS2 for example you directly program DMA transfer and packets!) at least the xbox shines in hardware abstraction.
M$ must have ported DOS and Windows 3.1 over to the
triple-core PowerPC xBOX 360.
------
M$ must have figured that it's better to ship
on time with crappy, unstable flaky system.
than to ship later with stable, usable and great system.
DisClaimer: My comments do not reflect nor represent anyone else nor my current employer's views or attitudes.
I'm 99% sure Microsoft was well aware of the instabilities before the product launch. It actually works to their benefit, as they can now inform gamers that they need to connect to Live to get the software patches
My tech blog
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.
This is a most rephrehensible comment to make. You claim that since a company wants to make a profit, they will, therefore, by definition, do ANYTHING that might make them money. For instance, if kidnapping children and selling them into sexual slavery in Southeast Asia is profitable, then ANY for-profit company would have no compunction at all in doing so. This is a wrong-headed, insulting, and stupid idea. Perhaps you believe it because you believe axiomatically that the profit motive is evil.
Welcome to Capitalism, enjoy your stay.
You and I have very different understandings of capitalism. To me, capitalism is when people trade value-for-value as free individuals. It is immoral to make money through force or fraud, and those who do it should be punished. Capitalism is merely that which exists by default when individual property rights are protected by the state, free people are allowed to trade, and force and fraud are punished. It is the celebration of individual excellence. It allows companies like Ben & Jerry's and Starbucks to exist which, despite their leftist lip-service, are actually shining monuments to the success of capitalism over older, inferior competitors.
To you, capitalism is probably the source of all the world's misery. I think that's an article of your faith as opposed to observations of reality.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Heh.. kinda glad i'll be waiting another couple of years, or atleast a couple of revsions. gee it sucks, so glad I wasn't waiting in a queue for this.
Worst Xmas present, ever? LOL.
/. is good for you.
No one claimed "NT" was unstable. But why would you think that the XBOX 360 software is based on NT?
And, its a game console... Wait for an update? Its supposed to be single-function plug it in and use it. How much more containment for testing do you need?
So, onward: bad hardware? its a contained stand-alone system. bad drivers? does this box even HAVE an OS? Anyway, all "drivers" come from a single source.
So, I would expect premium gaming hardware, with the "system" software stack from a single source, and the initial selection of games validated.
Of course the XBOX 360 claims to be able to run XBOX games, by using an virtualizer/emulator/translator. Again, I expect that this component would have a compatibility list (given that the XBOX itself was a contained system).
In any case -- I expect a very stable platform; no reference to "NT" needed.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Well, the XBox was "not bad", and Win2K+ is "acceptable", so we should expect the 360 to work.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
You won't be getting a dollar from me then.
Just wait until the Xbox 360 Service Pack 1 is released. It's Microsoft after all.
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
Not this kind of failure, but new launches always seem to be accompanied by problem reports - dead pixels, dead DVD drives, etc. I'm fully expecting that this is not the last problem for the XBox 360 and I'm looking forward to reading how good (or how bad) the legacy XBox emulation is.
People with a teaspoon or more of sense in their head wait a few weeks or more before buying a new system. And preferably a few months yet since there are precious few games to play anyway. I have to say I have a PS2 & a PSP but I think I'll wait until the chumps have proven the PS3 is not a lemon out of their own pockets before I would be interested. At least Sony have the luxury of an additional 5 or 6 months to make sure things are right.
Designing complex systems sounds a lot like a mastercard commercial... Years of architectual design - hundreds of millions of dollars Months of maticulous coding - tens of millions of dollars Less months of testing (because it has to get to market!) - tens of millions of dollars Fans discovering fatal flaws one day after launch? very very expensive.... I think that the breakdown is supposed to be something like 40-50ish % design 20ish % coding 30-40ish % testing...
Beautiful, just beautiful. Wai in line for hours and hours to get your hands on one of these only to have it crash repeatedly. Priceless. Go Nintendo!
This little-talked-about protection scheme creates the illusion that it is not worth copying in order to prevent users from making copies from rented or retail-purchased game software. This system works largely because customers often buy new items based on their newness and attractive wrappings. And since [retail] product returns are generally disallowed by most retailers' policies, this system is demonstrably workable.
This is good for training people at young age. If BSoD happens a lot in your games, you will think it's a normal thing to happen to computers later in your professional life!
I know they are pandering to the masses, but I guess it would be nice if we got "news for nerds" without anti-MS/pro-Linux stories and spins on stories whenever possible.
These guys did pre-emptively what alot of XBox360 owners must feel like doing right now.
yes, but this is a console. consoles are supposed to work straight out of the box. no other console launch has had this type of issue within the first 24 hours of release. defects usually start to become apparent after a few weeks or months or over time.
a installation of linux or windows is one thing, but wouldnt you get upset if you went to start up your new car and it blew up or crashed itself every time you turned it on? what about your new tv? what if it went fuzzy every time you turned stations? certain items are just supposed to work. the supposed reason consoles exist in the first place is so that you dont experience this sort of problem. otherwise we would all be computer gamers only.
The headline is still not indicative of the actual story.
XP is worse, however. I'm not going to put it down... too bad, but I think 2k was a lot more stable and handled issues a lot better. XP seems to run most anything, but it doesn't do it well. Also, the compatablity modes have never worked for me. But it's always a breath of fresh air to go back to a buggy XP install from working on ANY '98 machine (or SHUTTER a ME machine... I just won't touch them).
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
There's not a bunch of guys who play test every xbox 360 for a couple of hours before it's shipped. Please don't tell me you thought there were....
Can I submit my resume?
Could you please list the problems at launch for these systems. I grant you that when I was a youngen, there was not this fancy web, but I read WAY too many video game mags. I do not remember problems for all of the systems, just some (for example the PS2 drives).
Also I got many systems at launch with never a problem. The systems that I got at launch were the Colecovision, NES (yes with Robbie and the light gun), and Atari Lynx. My younger brother got the Super Nintendo and N64 at launch also with no problems.
We're taking components and cramming them in spaces with insufficient free air delivery and we're surprised when they crash and burn.
I've lost many hard drives and three computers (one Linux, one Mac and one Windows,) to "heat prostration". Sometimes the cases are not really capable of handling everything we can shove in there.
I hate the monolith in Redmond as much as the next guy but... heat is the enemy here.
I bet NOBODY who lives in a frozen food section at Safeway is reporting a crash.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
If all we have are "previous" and "next", we are living in some sort of weird "current-gen" time where there are no consoles and fanboys have nowhere to go... scary.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
"I have not had one crash, and the only trace I've seen of it is on Kotaku."
What, exactly, is "a trace" of a crash? Sounds like "a little bit pregnant" to me...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Everyone whos commenting saying that this isnt unusual, that people are making too much of a big deal out of this are more than a little full of shit. Consoles are not computers, you cannot compare them to a bad install. The hardware is identical, or at least should be, on all consoles, the software should be built to run on it flawlessly as developers should know exactly what theyre working with. I can understand hardware faults a few months in, things that cant be tested on a long enough timescale before release, but quality control should get the types of bugs out that we are seeing. Its completely unacceptable on a console. Its set production, set product, its like buying a car and having one in a thousand break down on the first day - that would not reflect well on the seller. Unfortunately with consoles theres not enough variety to drive people away from an individual model as a lot of games are unique to certain consoles. Its like saying you have to buy a ford to drive down this interstate, but the car is not all that unlikely not to make it all the way. Pathetic - the old meaning of the word.
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
Name another game console that does this. I, for one, have never heard of brand new consoles crashing with a multitude of errors and of games that trigger the crash.
Goo goo g'joob.
the video and screenshots have been proven fake.
"Taken with a Sony Cybershot." Great, now all our computers are probably infected with something.
new xbox: $400 decent game for xbox: $70 controller allowing you to play your game: $50 "live" system to play online: $150 blue screen at the boss: priceless
As much as the /. crowd complains about Microsoft products you would think they would realize buying version 1 of the 360 is like installing SP2 for Windows the day it comes out.
* Si hoc legere scis numium eruditionis habes *
Also, where I work has used a 3rd-party embedded network processor card which has had problems with both the DRAM timing, and incompatibities with specific types of SRAM chips that were ordinarily within spec. We found this out pretty quickly because I wrote a better memory test than anyone else was using with this board. And we have other PC-based equipment that has had a couple of incidents with bad motherboard DIMMs.
Hard crashes that affect a single digit percentage of users all running identical hardware and software, especially when some of those crashes are during boot.
[tinfoilHat]Now we know why Microsoft wanted to limit quantities on the launch day![/tinfoilHat] Ha, ha, it's not cool that the customers with these problems probably had to buy a couple hundred bucks of accessories and games just to move to the front of the line. This is not where you want to find out that your brand new expensive game system suffers from dodgy RAM chips.
This better not be happening in Japan, or they'll be stuck as the "DOABox" like the original XBox was. (Ha ha, that's funny, DOA, ha ha.) And if it is, they're probably going to have to send field service guys to people's houses to bow and gomennasai profusely as they swap out equipment to satisfy pissed off Japanese customers.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Of course they are crashing! That's the Windows Advantage brought all the way to your entertainment center!!
"I see undead people" Warcraft III - Necromancer
Slashdot is worse than the main stream press. I have no love for Microsoft but this editorializing is misleading. I have been playing PGR3 for hours without any problems. To characterize the XBOX 360 as "very unstable" seems like a bit of an exageration. I wish Slashdot was more balanced in its reporting.
A bad linux installation is *100%* your fault
So you're saying there are no bugs in any Linux installations?
Everybody knows that this problem can be solved by boiling your Xbox.
The obvious solution aside, I'm surpried that people are actually taking this story seriously, at least this early on. Does the overheating Xbox story of the last launch ring any bells? Exactly how over-hyped was that again? I'm holding off on buying a 360 myself, but not for this reason.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I said in a previous post that every Xbox 360 I had seen save one was locked up or crashed. And I got a 'troll' rating. Guess what?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
'Nuff said!
Ethics is what you say you do. Morals is what you actually do.
Do you work for the RIAA?
My understanding is that the 1st generation of games only runs with 1 of the 3 cpus, not using the other 2. If the problem is overheating then those other 2 get used whats going to happen?
From what I've been reading up on the problem it's all due to inadequete cooling. This could spawn a new business of developing and selling cooling technologies for the next-gen systems like there is one now for PCs.
Its entirely possible. Watch, I bet the first XBox 360 cooling products will hit as early as 1st quarter next year if not sooner.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
"whether or not you crash your rod before the first lap"
I don't believe that has anything to do with racing personally...
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
According to this link: http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=392599 14% are defective. I know it's by no means scientific nor hard fact, but 14% is a pretty bad early indication.
I went to Target to see how COD2 stacked up against the PC version, and the store demo was constantly crashing! OMG, somebody should've probably tested that a bit more, wouldn't you say?
I mean really, the hardware looks like a deal to gamers who are comfortable shelling out 400 bucks for a graphics card, but to Ma and Pa looking for Jr.'s Xmas gift, $400 is a hefty sum. When the store demo crashed, I shook my head and said to myself, "who's gonna' buy a broken system?"
So, are we to think that Slashdot is being paid by Sony? A completly unfair headline. Not a word suggesting the possibility of poor software (which is highly likely on a new platform), just another opportunity to bash Microsoft, which has gone beyond all reason and fairness. This does little for the credibility of this forum.
Re-releasing discs is cheap and at least the system itself has upgradeable firmware.
Speaking of which--what's the line on when XBOX 360 will be hacked?
Kriston
Both are equally valid.
Wha-huh? It fucking ate the "less than" sign. Correction:
"2006 is less than 2008".
http://www.techimo.com/newsapp/index.pl?photo=1513 8
I know they are pandering to the masses, but I guess it would be nice if we got "news for nerds" without anti-MS/pro-Linux stories and spins on stories whenever possible.
Your new here aren't you!
sorry couldn't resist.
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
Whoa! That's even better than my testing criteria! I usually consider something is shipable when it compiles without errors. Thank you for opening my eyes to a whole new QA method... you've saved me countless hours.
I have a couple or three old games from the DirectX 5 era that need the compatibility modes to run. Without them, they just bail out saying "Cannot run on Windows NT". With the 98 mode on, they run just fine.
Incidentally, SP4 of Win2k (or was it 3? I forget) added the compatibility modes to Windows 2000, you just have to manually register something with regsvr32 to enable them.
My Xbox 360 came out of the box BROKEN. I haven't been able to get it to power up at all. No lights, nothing. It just sits there.
Crashing games doesn't sound so bad to me.
"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."
If they had released it on time and had it work then it would have been a win.
This is a Video Game console! You are not supposed to have to patch it. It really is supposed to just work!
Even if the patches where to add new functions or to fix "minor" issues that might be okay but not random crashes.
If this is really happening Microsoft very well may have to pay for it. I have played some of the demos and while they where nice I didn't feel a need to rush out and buy it. If these start being returned it could be a big deal.
I am more interested in the Revolution. Right now graphics have reached "good enough" I am more interested in game play now.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The thing is if you are nerd thats worth any kind of a damn, you ought to be anti-MS and pro-Linux by birth. Microsoft's technology sucks and they only gained their dominant position via unscrupulous means.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
SO the hardware which is sold for hundreds less what it costs to make should be more stable than that few hundred dollar piece of stand-alone software?
Anyone remember how BAD the original NES was? You tap the system the wrong way and it crashes.
Makes me wonder if the removal of the power supply from the unit was a "design" feature (as MSFT would lead us to believe), or part of a solution to what they perceived to be an excessive heat problem.
It's likely bad game programming, as all the games essentially dump the OS when loading.
Same thing happened with GTA: Vice City (among others). Rockstar didn't do the sound code right, so all the pedestrians would stop talking after a few minutes of playing. Everyone blamed MS. It had nothing to do with MS -- it was Rockstar's crappy code.
What the Wall Street Journal article failed to capture, however, was the correlation between the recent (mid) production line testing (equipment) glitchs at the factory (PR'd as bottlenecks in the testing methods), and the reality behind those 'two hours or so of automated testing and five minutes of manual testing'...leading us to today's headline.
Those two hours of supposed 'automated testing' are hands-off, burn-in time only (no loaded media)...no system testing involved, only logging the device id and power consumption while it sits on the burn rack. The five minutes 'manual' is more like two, with 'testing' being nothing more than voltage leak checks and on/off stabs.
"It's broke, Jim, and since my expertise is limited to human anatomy, there's no way in hades you're going to use any damn xbox until we get back to earth....sorry."
I believe they call these things "lemons".
Lemons will always exist as long as people are still working on the last day of the work week.(Forever)
Perhaps, but it may be the case that you have it backwards. I think that there is a chance that, similar to Rare's Perfect Dark Zero, Xboxes were manufactured before testing was completed, in order to make the release date. Once it was determined that there was a problem affecting a decent percentage of xboxes, it was already too late to push back the release date, so instead, damage control was done and the xbox was release in limited numbers as a 'planned shortage' as to still hit their release date, while not upsetting a large number of people, as the people who were forced to wait for the second shipment will recieve the patched xboxes.
On a side note, my girlfriend who won an xbox360 in the pepsi contest had recieve a non functional system, a fairly common problem I've heard
Pope is accused of defecating in forested areas
Jackie Treehorn: Refill?
The Dude: Does the Pope shit in the woods?
...and 99% of consumer products nowadays are crap. This is something I've noticed, especially in programming, is that quality is meaningless.
Quality is not some auxiliary adjunct property of an item, it is the SOLE value of the item. Consider, for instance, a pair of roller skates. We can abstractly quantify their quality from 0 to 100. Skates that do not work, or, perhaps, a couple of rocks, would have Skate Quality = 0. Skates that glided effortlessly, with zero chafe, are light and breezy (or warm if ice skates), would have Skate Quality = 100 (being the perfect pair of skates).
Now, if you buy an item with Skate Quality = 0, anticipating skating value, you just got robbed. Selling a product of low quality is actually, in my opinion, misrepresentation and fraud.
You buy things for their utility. If you do not receive that utility, you have been robbed. This is the state of affairs today--you are being systematically robbed. For instance, I paid for an eyeglass prescription THREE TIMES, once from an opthamologist, and 1) they all varied considerably, and 2) I still don't have a good prescription for my left eye. That's money stolen from me as far as I'm concerned because I have received little value for my money. Will I have to buy a dozen prescriptions and do a mathematical average of them? WTF is wrong with this world?
Capitalism is broken.
paying that much (hel paying HALF that much) just makes my head hurt.
Uh, dude, it's pretty f'ing hard to make a package that can tolerate being shipped thousands of miles with a 0% failure rate. Not to mention, the unit has just been put into production. Most of the possible failure mechanisms have not been identified yet, so it's hard to design tests for them. Maybe the console will overheat after 5 hours if a heatsink was not properly assembled -- how would you do production line testing for that? Once they get some feedback from the warranty claims, the reliability will improve.
for Workgroups
No. If you are really a nerd, as in intelligent, you should not need or want to be pandered to by getting spins put on stories that make you feel like you were right all along. Just RTFA every once in a while to see how blown-out-of-proportion stories like this are.
On the other hand, if you are a nerd, as in socially underdeveloped and insecure, having your ego stroked off by seeing a viewpoint you agree with over and over again would be right up your alley.
Not everyone wants to be a slashbot.
Oh, the horrors...
Buy a console from an unrepentant, convicted monopolist,
or buy one from an unrepentant spyware vendor.
Fuck that - I'm going to the bar and play Big Buck Hunter 2006.
It is news. If we don't talk about it, and no one talks about it, and it turns out to be a real problem, the only folks who know about it are the individual, separated, noncommunicative customers and Microsoft. People deserve to know this information. Stop trying to silence critics. They serve a legitimate and important purpose.
Not that I disagree with you here.
Ford didn't make the Pinto to explode. There wasn't a board meeting where a project manager said "I want to make a car that explodes on impact."
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
More likely, however, is that the X360 is just crap, and you should wait for either a Revolution or PS3.
Well we can all agree on that one!
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
You are a moron. I'm not a MS fan, I think they make crappy products. Drooling fanboy.. that's laughable.
Things slip through quality control, it happens. The title of this article is bullshit at the moment. It should read "a few xboxes failed".
The point is you're jumping on them with absolutely no evidence. I doubt you can find any complex product that doesn't have a small percentage of lemons that slip though QA.
"And seriously, how many console models have you seen in your life that had this kind of failure after the initial launch"
What kind of failure you ass? A few consoles crashed. EVERY console shipped to date has had duds. You have absolutely no clue if you think otherwise. Guess what genius, people with lemon consoles in the mid 80's couldn't throw a webpage up and have thousands of people jump to poor conclusions because of it.
IF it turns out that significant percentage of Xboxes fail, THEN maybe you have a point.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I thought the Xbox was made by Microsoft?
Have you seen the outrageous prices being demanded on eBay? Yesterday (launch day in the US) they were between $800-$1,000 for the premium. Today (the day after) they're down to $500-ish - all promising Nov 22nd or Nov 23rd delivery. On the US eBay site (http://search.ebay.com/xbox360) there were 1,400 systems for sale, with dozens of auctions ending every minute.
Given the comments here, can we say "Get them while they're hot"?
Gamecube had its problems too, just not publicly. I got the fortune of going "behind the scenes" and seeing the Gamecube some months before release. From what I remember, someone found what IBM called a *major* flaw. Since the final units were in production, there could be no hardware design changes. IBM was hard at work pinpointing, replicating, and finding a fix for it. Since I did not see any problems with the final product, I'm guessing they found a work-around and, again guessing, the dev kits were updated accordingly. Public disaster avoided...
Are you screwed if this thing needs an update?
I worked somewhere once where originally the QA test process was the time it took to burn the product to CD...
Thankfully we at least progressed to where we'd confirm if it would read again later in a different drive... *grin*
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I hope you don't get modded down as a troll. I think this is an important distinction; there is a big difference between people who get jazzed up just by the idea of creating something cool and great and fun, and people who get jazzed up more by the thought of driving someone else out of the market.
Really, if it's a piece of crap, return it. Otherwise, they'll just keep spooning you more crap and taking your money, forever.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
This story was created, or at least hyped, by retailers to convince us to by extended warranties. I can hear the blue shirted dweebs now, "Oh man you've GOT to buy the warranty. Haven't you heard?! These things are crashing right and left!"
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I am a Software Quality Engineer. I know first had where testing falls on the list of priorities for a business. Microsoft does not value testing and QA the way they should. The game industry as a whole needs to start adopting QA practices if we are ever going to get beyond this current generation of consoles. We keep throwing complexity into the fire and expecting things to be fine... that complexity is the fuel that will halt the industry and send us back to the 1970's.
You will see more of this as time passes and when complaints start rolling in Microsoft will wiggle its way out of this mess but in the end deliver much less than what they promised.
DO THE SMART THING AND WAIT UNTIL THEY GET THEIR ACT TOGETHER!!!
MAKE THEM RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR MISTAKE!!!
DO NOT BUY AN XBOX 360 UNTIL MARCH!!!
I smell a recall
Since I wasn't lucky enought to get an xbox 360 yet, Send all your crashing xbox 360's to me, I will be more than happy to test them for all you people complaining.
Rob
I really am confused about this standing in line to pay top dollar for bleeding edge buggy product. More money than brains?
Same goes for nutbars who camp out see the first showing of a movie. Hello, you can see it 12 times a day for the next 2 weeks.
I guess these are also your basic "first post" morons as well.
I might at some point once they have sorted out the bugs, dropped the price and have a good selection of games consider one of these machines, but it is nuts to buy into they hype of being one of the "first" million customers...
What were they thinking? Let's see, we missed the last million deliverable dates on all our other products due to not evaluating for enough time.
Nope, try: "Let's tell the herd that the new version of Windows will come out next year (and next year it's next year) so that they won't buy our competitor's superior products that happen to be shipping TODAY." Or something like that.
You get what you pay for, but $300++ isn't cheap IMNSHO.
Are you kidding me? You think that a triple core multithreading 3.2 GHz processor with a top of the line video card and 512MB of ram for $300 is expensive? I would love to know where you are buying your computer equipment from, because if it is cheaper than this then I have found a replacement for NewEgg and PriceWatch.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
That's not correct. The PS2 had a large number of defects on their CD/DVD drives. That is well known. Mine didn't, but lots of others did.
Anything you buy, appliance or electronics or whatever, is SUPPOSED to work out of the box. Sometimes people get a defective item.
My son came home last night talking about a friend at school who stood in line to purchase one of these OVER HYPED game systems. He took it home and set it up and after about 5 min of gameplay the system crashed and became un-usable. He is now taking it back for a refund. Based on their track record, Microsoft will have to come out with a firmware upgrade or some such nonsense as consumers have once again become their beta testers.
One thing that is worth sharing is the answer 'makaveli87' (post #79 in the Xbox Forums) gave about his contact with MS Support:
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I wish I had a dollar for every smirk on the /. readers' faces who read this article and have preached against Microsoft in the last few years.
Why? Microsoft have way more money than that, and they can't even make things that work.
Companies like Dell do burn in tests on ALL their ordered computers. It is absoulutely needed to improve quality. Recalling boxes and the bad PR are much more expensive than testing boxes.
- Just because you can't, doesn't mean you shouldn't
Well, that's 1 person who got a faulty system! That must mean 100% of the systems are faulty, right? I'm glad you're so upset about this but without a meaningful defect rate, these anecdotal stories say nothing about how stable the XBox 360 is. (And this is coming from someone who is waiting to buy the Nintendo Revolution.)
Of course it crashes. XBox 360 == XBox Version 2.0. Everyone knows MS never gets anything right until Version 3 + SP 1.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So how do you get your x-box replaced if they're all sold out?
Step 2: Stop playing Sony music CD's in your new XBox. Everyone knows by now only MS O/S's are vulnerable to being rooted by Sony malware.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This is a lot of the reasons I got out of console gaming and stick with my PC. None of these consoles seem to be reliable.
A friend of mine is an avid console gamer. So far, he's gone through 2 playstations, 3 PS2's and and Xbox. The only thing he hasn't managed to break so far is his Gamecube, which is a testament of Nintendo building a console to last. Just wait for the PS3 and the revolution to be released, and then lets compare which console has the most problems.
Sony is betting the farm on a lot of market untested technologies, Specifically Bluray. Bluray doesn't nearly have the 5+ years of refinement that DVD has had, and I can bet that looking at a bluray disk funny let alone getting fingerprints or a scratch on the disk will make it very susceptible to read failure. Meanwhile, Nintendo and Microsoft are using much more mature DVD tech, which will pay off with much less failure in the long run.
Speaking of Bluray, Yes 50GB is great, but show me a game that uses more than 8.5GB. The only one that comes to my mind is the Everquest series with every expansion they have. Even HL2 and Quake4/Doom III with their mind blowing graphics doesn't crack a single layer of a dual layer DVD, so my guess is that most of that storage will be used for "Sega CD" uses like audio and video, instead of just using the high powered graphics hardware to do the cut scenes for you. Simply put, the only reason they put Bluray in the PS3 is to stronghold the movie industry to make Bluray the High Dev Movie standard, and in doing so, Sony is risking the relibility of the hardware.
Nintendo wise, it looks like they went the path of refining the gamecube. The Cube's reliability is already pretty high. the only thing in question is the CD-ROM drive. Being a slot loader vs the old top loading design may be a problem, but knowing Nintendo they won't ship until the thing could survive warfare.
Microsoft biggest problem is it likes to use commodity parts for it's hardware. Yes it make it a lot cheaper but it also bites them because it's not designed to take console level abuse. The Detachable hard drive to me looks like a big failure point, especially if there's no active protection on these drives. The CD-Roms are probably a big failure point as well. I also believe that heat problems are going to plague them as well, but time will tell.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
On the contrary, MS wanted to hype up the XBox 360 release. They are pumping money and time into getting people to closely look the XBox 360. Their intention was to get people to consider buying one of these things but what they got was some critism. They are drawing attention to any problems themselves.
So congrats to Microsoft...it worked. People are closely looking at the XBox 360 and noticing less than desirable things in real world usage. It seems like more of a hardware problem than a software one so it is going to be interesting how they approach any fix.
Another poster pointed this out, but other consoles weren't released when a sizeable fraction of the population instantly posted every detail of their lives on the web in either a blog, messageboard, or whatever.
It doesn't mean they were better, it just means it was easier for the company to control the news of the defects. I had a defective Genesis.
Comment of the year
That's disgusting, and that has everything to do with why I despise the Xbox
I agree totally. If I had any mod points I'd mod you back up.
That's my main problem with Microsoft, and you've summed it up nicely. It isn't that they make bad software. Plenty of companies do. It's their attitude. It stinks.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
All i can say is: Buy a computer, get some games, and play them. And wow you can also surf the web, check email, and do pretty much anything on it.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
youre right. i addressed this in this topic somewhere... http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169149&cid=141 00045
both the ps2 and xbox had large problems with dvd drives in their early models.
the major difference about the ps2 drives is that they all didnt fail straight out of the box. usually the drives started failing after a few weeks or months of use. also keep in mind that many early adopters were using their ps2's as dvd drives which required more wear on the drives. the drives for both systems were cheap, and wear and tear made that fact apparent. here we have issues with the x360 that we can not attribute to any sort of wear and tear.
Maybe if the Xbox fan boys would give up some of their 'fans' for cooling the box a little more there wouldn't be these heat related issues. ## i got nothing....
They're test escapes. The reality is that manufacturing defects will happen, but that they're supposed to be caught. If they're not caught, they become field returns, and your SPQL goes down. And man, you don't ever want to have your shipped-product quality level hurting. It means really unhappy customers.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
If you look at all the other post here, this is far from an isolated unit. Based on the number of issues, Its obvious that there is a problem with those systems. I wouln't be in a hurry to purchase one now!
The enemy of my enemy...
hey, mine is crashig bc. of slashdot traffic (right? asking to MS fans here, right?!)
If overheating is the problem as a number of posts seem to suggest, then I can see why Microsoft waited to release XBox 360 in November. Expect the real wave of failures to start hitting about June of 2006.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
IBM's PPC970 is known to produce vast quantities of heat, particularly with three cores. And ATI's modern GPUs are hot potatoes as well - particularly when you consider that the ATI GPU in the XBOX is also serving as the northbridge.
By all accounts, the system produces ~180W of heat while playing games. That's a lot to handle with only two 60mm fans.
Microsoft is not alone with this problem - the PS3 has an NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX derivitive that is clocked very high; it will produce at least 80W, and Cell will likely produce ~80W. More problematic for Sony is the fact that the current PS3 case has very few vent holes.
Make no mistake - heat is an issue that will be problematic for all next generation consoles. The days of 25W desktop CPUs are over, as are the days of 30W performance GPUs.
I'm just surprised that no one was smart enough to put a bloody Sempron in one of these consoles...
Well every current owner of an XBox 360 now has a legitamate legal primary use for installing a mod chip!
I have seen a few posts over at Xbox scene and elsewhere that are saying that the crashing is due to a bad power supply. The switched power supplies with other 360's, and the problems followed one particular power supply, and the system that had the problem at first worked fine with another power supply. I played for a few hours last night on both PGR and Perfect Dark, and had no problems what so ever. I will admit, though, that I am going to be saving on the heating bills this winter, as the box does spit out some really warm air.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel...
Shouldn't they? What is the reason to sign a code if you don't at least test it before?
Rethinking email
I wonder what impact the various xbox versions have one this.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Looks to me more like the graphics system is overheading based on the graphical glitches being displayed when it freezes.
I'd troll and say that ATI has a tendency of not cooling their products enough, but I would expect that something like this should have been tested under extreme conditions.
Maybe it's just the people who keep the unit on carpet or put it under their TV with the door closed are having problems? Guess we'll have to wait and see
How many of these crashes are deadlocks? Or otherwise thread related.
It appears that the hardware world is going multi-core to keep up with Moore's Law...
I think some brilliant computer scientists need to invent some things that are far superior to mutex's to truly enable software in the multi-threaded future... The limiting factor here may be human brainpower to come up with a solution to this problem...
I feel like locks and condition variables are kind of like stone tools, and we're trying to build a car... We need some new tools...
hard core geek-ware
That's what I thought, but the following post (from this page) makes it sound like they're having more problems than expected:
makaveli87 said:
"Ok I phoned tech support, I was on hold for about 40min. The first guy didn't really know what he was talking about, he kept trying to tell me to do things I had already tried like unplug everything or "read the manual" so he connected me to someone else. This guy seemed like a gamer or he at least knew what he was talking about. He told me that they were having several problems with the launch consoles, the hdd problem, overheating, something to do with the HD to SDTV thing on the back, game disks being scratched , problems with the operating system and a few disk read errors.
He said the overheating problem will be the most common and that this is what I have. (If your console turns off or the screen freezes 90% of the time its an over heating issue. If you get one of the error screens its and OS problem.) he said for both of these problems they need to replace the console and that it would take 6-10 weeks!!! I asked why and he said that they are experiencing more problems then hey had hoped and that he is supposed to say 6-8 weeks, but last week he was telling people 4-6 and those people would be waiting until mid-january. He wouldn't go further into that though. He did tell me that I could hold onto the system and use it as much as I can for 2 or 3 weeks, send it in then and I would still get it back 6-10 weeks from now.
Anyways the warranty covers any of those major problems I stated above so that's good. I guess #1 on MS list is to sell all of their consoles to new customers and let the people with problematic ones wait until after the holidays."
The link in the Slashdot article to the video takes you to a website that says you cannot link directly. Following their link takes you to a web page that says that the video has been taken down due to "copyright, pornography or objectionable content" issues.
I hate to rumor-monger conspiracy theories here (oh, what the heck, this is slashdot for ghod's sake) but I wonder if Microsoft got to them...
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
A defect caused by a poor design, and only in the early models. Sounds familiar! A moving part was made of plastic and it wore a groove down in it over time. This messed up the lens alignment as it wasn't hitting the disk at 90 degrees. Turning it upsidedown meant that that gravity did the same job as the plastic sled. You could fix it by filling the groove with glue or some other filler to level it off.
My main point: How many of the people with problems have the machine sitting on a carpet? I see this at friends places all the time. Most devices have vent holes on the bottom and passive ventilation is essential from bottom to top. If you place it on a carpet, you cover half of the vents and remove most of the airflow. If the xbox 360 is already a hot potato, this could even lead to a fire hazard. However, it should not be crashing. If it's overheating, the BIOS should notice and shutdown long before you start to get random glitches.
If you don't have a desk to put it on, put a hard-back book between it and the floor.
The beta version is significantly larger (30-40%) than the production version.
The PS2 has been plagued with reliability problems, both at launch and afterwards. It had similar heating issues and a lot of the same problems were reported. It's a mix of people not understanding that higher powered consoles are more sensitive to placement and heat ventilation, and the production issues that comes with first mass producing something.
All these same rumors were present at the Xbox launch. Units being returned in droves, DVDs being scratched by the disc player, and all other kinds of malarkey. It ended up being untrue and just a couple of problems being blown out of proportion, and this will as well.
I think there are more iPOD nanos having problems than there are 360s at the moment, but we're not jumping all over our sacred cow Apple, now are we?
...or stop buying Microsoft products.
Except that Slashdot has spent the last two weeks posting every Xbox 360 hype story out there. The 360 is a topic that readers here are interested in and you can't ignore the good stuff becasue they publish one bad story.
They will do the same thing for the other consoles as well.
The manufacturing process for these XBOX's is probably not very mature, I think the real question is the nature of the problem. Are the errors distributed randomly across all devices and thus indicates a systemic/design problem? Are only certain units failing? If so this indicates a manufacturing or component level problem most likely. You can design the best product in the world but if its built incorrectly, or some retard in purchasing buys poor quality parts... you're still screwed. Lastly, these boxes could just be outliers.
I really hate MS, but we don't have enough info to bash them yet, until we do, its intellectually dishonest to bash them :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Hmmm...I explect my Motorcycle to be tested and functional "Out of the Box" (Off the Lot) too. An improperly functioning motocycle is a very dangerous thing.
Or were you compairing the Xbox 360 to a Unicycle?
the thread says that they will send out repairmen, sounds pretty reasonable so far. Granted if all they do is say "Too bad" when they get there then its crap.
The headline implies that the whole platform is unstable -- come you editors -- what the fuck are you thinking?
"Some XBOX 360's experiencing stability issues" would have been a lot better -- and not an out right lie.
...(hopefully one of them on executing unsigned code from removable media as well) to branch into one's homebrew code on a DRMed machine. ;-)
Can you already hear the penguins flap their wings?
Its a pitty when a college going student works overime to invest into something kewl(Microsoft XBOX 360,Sony PSP).Later, he finds out that the newest piece of coolest equipment is faulty. As mentioned earlier the heating problems of XBOX360 along with few other errors. In case of Sony PSP, many people have found dead pixels on their screen . In return sony says
"Note:P.115 PSP manual: "LCD screens are made with high quality precise technology, but in some cases, black, red, blue or green spots may remain on the screen. This is not a malfunction".
What the hell! They have covered the story and a person can do nothing abt it.
As you may recall when u get a new laptop and the maunal will say the same. However, the laptop companies gurantees that if u get more than 3 bad pixels the product will be replaced.
But in case of sony its a complete rip off. In case of XBOX 360 let's hope something better happens(fingers crossed but i'm in doubt).
There is a need to understand that a product should be throughly tested and presented to the customer. SONY Listen up!!
haha, maybe it is the game man:)
I had it on Xbox (not 360) for a test run, and the game is so crappy, Socom II looks better than that.
Ohh multiplayer is so interesting as whipping myself with poison ivy...
I am soo happy I can test games at my local store before shelling money out on them...
I'm surprised I'm the only one that heard about this.
My girlfriend works for a big box electronics store.
They received a memo yesterday stating that 1 in 3 xbox 360's were defective. A warning I guess.
Anyway she swore me to secrecy as she was herself.
Believe me if you like, but I bet before long this memo will be circulating the net.
A defective new $15 toaster can be much easier to deal with than a defective new $300-$400 (or $1000+ on EBay) toy. Even if your toaster vs. XBox 360 defect anology were valid, most stores will just have you grab another toaster off the shelf to replace a defective toaster. Hell, paying $15 for another toaster isn't a big thing. Right now, few stores have any XBox 360's on the shelf and the few stores that have any left would probably prefer to sell them rather than give them up for an exchange. How long will it take to replace an XBox 360 that was discovered to be defective today? how about if it is discovered to be defective on Dec. 25th?
And what you expect isn't always what you get. You've never bought a new car, have you?
This is turning into a M$ fanboy vs. M$ antifanboy thread. Stop and take a look at the facts. Microsoft wanted to be first and wanted to release it in time for the Christmas buying season. We all know what happens when you rush software or hardware to market. There's bound to be a few bugs. We don't even really know the extent of the faulty units because a good percentage of units bought will go under Christmas trees. Now I admit that I am not a fan of Microsoft, but I'm ust laying out facts. It is admittedly going to be an issue to replace the faulty units because of demand being so high. It's one of the top gifts for Christmas after all. Just remeber to blow on the disk and jiggle it as you turn the unit on with just the right touch on the power switch. Ah, the original Nintendo, those were the days.
I have been playing quite a bit, and I haven't seen anything like this happen yet.
As a matter of fact I have been SHOCKED at how well the service (xbox live) has worked in light of having so many new people slamming the service. My bet is that there is a heat related issue with this guys console, but I don't see what the story is as he can just return it and get another unit if it's defective.
On that note, I don't own a regular xbox, and didn't really know what to expect with xbox live. My out of game experience was pretty amazing. I have been having a absolute blast racing online with others on PGR, I haven't even bothered opening the 3 other games I purchased.
I don't understand why so many people are giving this thing such bad press and negative commentary, as it's provided me with some of the most entertaining online gaming I have yet experienced. I can jump on and be racing other gamers in less than 3 minutes, and have had white-knuckles due to such close races, the service does a great job at pitching you against other like-skilled racers.
The problem with some companies is that they will not even make a cursory attempt at discovery before commiting to a deadline. I'm currently observing this on my own job...
C - the footgun of programming languages
My 360 was on for about 15 hours straight playing 6 different titles for several hours each and the only one to crash was PGR3. It was the second game we played so it was perhaps 5 hours into the life of the unit. Aside from the power cycle required to clear that crash the system ran fine. I'd say the problem was caused by a buggy PGR3 not heat. But what do I know?
X-Box 360 overheats YOU!
Seriously though, this is not the kind of launch coverage MS had in mind. I imagine if the issue is really this serious then we'll see some major media coverage and then you'll see some serious MS PR splash to make up for it. I wonder if they'd actually make a formal press release about it if the percentage of those with issues is high enough?
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
If you think posts on Slashdot prove anything, you don't understand statistics and surveys. Math is your friend.
Just as a bit of related info. I had the chance to really delve into the xbox a few weeks ago at a sneak preview. While I found some of the xbox menus and instructions to be non-intuitive, I was able to play for 4-5 hours straight on at least 5 different machines and never saw a crash on any game, that's including PGR. In fact, they even had an in-house network setup for playing on xbox live which also worked fine.
Now that could easily be meaningless since it is not exactly a real world environment or a suitably long testing time frame, but I wonder if either something changed before launch or the problem has to do with some specfic configuration. Did anyone else out there that played it previous to launch notice anything peculiar?
Determine your best un-padded estimate and then double it.
I'm not kidding.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Most people believe the os for the 360 is a derivative of Windows 2000, much like the OS for the original XBOX. See this article for info on that.
It's really not a stretch to believe that a variant of the NT architecture runs the 360 when you think about it. It even uses a variant of the DirectX api's found in windows. Why would Microsoft engineer a completely new operating environment when they have a good foundation to start with (NT kernel), especially one that already has a proven track record of being solid in a gaming device (the original xbox)?
I have one, it's got quite a workout over the last two days. I've played PGR3 almost exclusively, and it is not crashed one bit. Used nearly every feature too! In fact, it's running right now.
This guy got a bum unit. It happens. Ridiculous to put an article on it on slashdot.
I have two beefs with with the unit. First it is loud/hot. And you cannot simply put it in a stereo cabinet to get around the noise. it'll get too hot. Second problem is that in PGR3, I set the view to "in-car", and often when the next race starts, it has changed the view to something else, and I have to switch it as it counts down "3,2,1...".
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The pictures clearly shows that the graphics card is overheating.
No I'm saying that it will not be as unreliably as the xbox at doing what it is supposed to do, play video games, and play them well. A system crash in the first lap of gotham racing on 360 would be the equivalent of a kernel panic on boot. While this happens it is very rare and usually because of experimental CVS drivers, unsupported hardware, third party drivers, or a bad setup. Fortunately I compile my own kernels and I know what I'm doing. If you're going to use linux you need to know a little about what you're doing (usually). An xbox is an appliance like a microwave, refrigerator, toaster, macosx, or winxp. It should be simple enough for kids to use and for others to just use without having to think about its internal components, heating, cooling, why its crashing etc.
Mine works fine, played 7 launch titles on it, watched some dvd's, streamed movie and music from my pc, played on Xbox Live, downloaded the Kameo demo, left it on for about 20 hours straight with no issue. So yes it sucks for those guys but guess what SHIT HAPPENS. Every console launch has some defects. I worked at EB during the PS2 launch and our stores defect rate was 37% which is just unheard of! These problems seem small and will be corrected im sure.
I seriously doubt that ANY video game console company does burn-in testing for 24-hours before shipping the unit to market.
That would be ridiculous. But with the kinds of flaws that are being reported, I have to wonder if Microsoft even did a 24-hour burn-in on a handful of representative production units before shipping out.
A lot of the problems appear to be related to the retail hardware being a tad lower in quality than the development kits that the software was originally developed on. What could Microsoft have done differently to avoid this fiasco?
Define 'very'
I don't think they even made enough for there to be 10's of thousands of 360's period! ;)
> But why would you think that the XBOX 360 software is based on NT?
Because all MS OSs from the last 5 years have been based on NT?
All right I am waiting till SP-2.
Are you crazy? That might lead a temporal feedback loop that could tear the ship apart!
May the Maths Be with you!
"This is about as easy as QA testing gets so there is absolutely no excuse for crashes of any kind on the release lineup."
One way to spot anti-MS trolls is to watch for statements like yours.
If you had bothered to actually THINK for a second, you'd realize there are many reasons for crashes.
Nice troll though.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
Well, I guess all you Xbox gamers will have to wait for Microsoft to release service pack 1 to fix all the little bugs plaguing your shiny new consoles. At least Sony and Nintendo are smart enough to choose the tried and true Linux OS. lol :)
"And seriously, how many console models have you seen in your life that had this kind of failure after the initial launch?"
Several. Did you even bother checking this out before you trolled?
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
Like our ancestors used to say:
"The day Microsoft makes a product that does not suck will be the day they start making vacuum cleaners."
The only reason that Ford was not held criminally liable for the actions of its agent, executed in the course of his employment is the the (I believe) NTSB said you only had to test to a patently unrealistic 5 mph to meet government rear-end crash safety requirements. The NTSB had proposed increasing that to 15 mph but under intense industry lobbying, abandoned that plan. Since Ford met the federal standard, that pre-empted any state cause of action for criminal liablity. Make no mistake, Ford and Lee Iacocca are morally blameworthy for the deaths caused by their design decisions, it is merely the corruption of money politics that prevents them from being held liable.
There is no reset button in life; however, there are bonus levels.
I hear the graphics are pretty.
I'm waiting until at least Xbox 360SP2...
Keep in mind that this OS is running on a new architecture, so I don't know that the stability of the NT 5.x kernel on x86 serves as any kind of indicator of how it runs on PPC, if that's even what they're using. Certainly I've seen Microsoft's PDA OS crash quite frequently.
rooooar
You have the makings of a successful IT manager.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I am aware of those facts. That still doesn't prove that Ford went out to purposely design a car that explodes on impact. They designed a car cheaply, discovered a flaw, and left it (which is wrong).
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Nah, that's just the reason every Xbox 360 includes the free Silver Live Subscription. People will be able to download patches, and buy things from the Marketplace, but not play multiplayer games.
Maybe we'll see sellers on eBay offering the xBox 300 with a 24-hour burn-in, with pictures of the unit still working after 24 hours.
The old Xbox didn't hold up so well either, I remember it freezing every twenty minutes playing Morrowind, a near launch game. As someone who's currently sub-contracting for Microsoft and has seen first-hand, I must say they don't have their project management act together at all.
As far as everyone's comments already regarding this, I think it's rubbish to say that this should be expected from a rushed launch event or that it was all conspired to make money... There's no excuse for a product failing it's own core functionality, be it a toaster or a complicated computer, and given the company's history we can't expect much in the way of a fix. Microsoft will brush this off like they always do, drop their stock by 3 points, and go back to pretending to work on security for Windows.
It will never work as well as a Sony or Nintendo contrived contraption. But despite the fuss, I'm still going to buy mine when my local EB is able to fill my preorder. Good developers will be able to code around the issues of terrible compression and hardware flaws, and it will all get swept under the rug within the year.
The pope is infallible so he has no sins to confess.
I was at the Zero Hour launch event -- there were somewhere between 200-300 consoles there, and at no point did I see one crash. If the problem was/is as bad as it's suggested to be here, I would have seen (or experienced myself) several crashes with that many consoles. I've also had mine for a week, and although I admittedly haven't used it much I've experienced no problems whatsoever.
This reminds me of the original Xbox launch, with all the overheating problems. My original Xbox never even got warm to the touch -- I have 3 original Xboxes in house, and haven't had a single problem at any point in my years of ownership, other than some boot failures when a modchip pin came off.
Meh, maybe I'm just lucky.
(Score:-1, Wrong)
Nope, just the FCC
/.ers watch Family Guy?
Don't
500,000 sold. A couple bad ones. Surprising? No.
The device has 1700 parts in it. Lets assume the parts are 99.9999% reliable. That means one in 500 units contains a bad part. 500,000 were sold, that means 1,000 bad ones. And that doesn't count units that are damaged due to shipping.
Now, I'm sure MS is doing a better job than 1 in 500 bad ones. But still, even at 1 in 5,000 there would be 100 out there. Does it still seem odd to find stories of a dozen ro a couple dozen that don't work?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The OS X version of Quake 3 has a bug on some systems where it will crash if you are shot just right. It shows up very often when you are shot in the face with a plasma gun, since there is such a large number/dispersion of plasma balls.
:)
Anyway, they have stopped maintaining that software (it was just a bonus port anyway - the official release is for system 9), and the official bug fix is to duck
I heard Microsoft recived a patent on the computer crash. A judge agreed it was a unique Microsoft feature and issued the patent. Next they hope to patent a "virus friendly environment". Not sure the commercial value but hey it keeps their army of patent lawyers employed.
Looking at the crashes, I would suspect memory corruption, due to bad cooling, defective parts, poor grounding/isolation.
Nothing new. This is the first production batch and the quality is still so-so. This happens every time with consumer electronics - although, interestingly enough, not so much with PC(computer) parts. The people buying the consoles should have well known the risk.
It's a lot easier to patch software.
Reality has a notoriously liberal bias -- Stephen Colbert
Only those who read slashdot wish to be slashbots. Welcome to the collective.
The two definitions of nerd that you stated are two sides of the same coin. You cannot have a highly intelligent person who is not also socially underdeveloped and insecure.
Well in movies you can but not in real life.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Too much synergy would clearly be as bad or worse than not enough, but these simple crashes are clearly caused by undersynergization.
"This is certainly NOT normal for the console industry."
That's just wrong.
Evey industry that involves electronics has failures. ALL of them.
The fact that you even attempt to suggest otherwise calls your knowledge of the subject into question.
That being said, several other consoles have had problems at launch as well, so I would say that is most certainly IS normale for the console industry, and the facts back me up.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
I'm pretty sure the GP is referring to the /. headline. It doesn't say "Some Xbox 360's very unstable", it says "Xbox 360 very unstable". As in, the console as a whole is very unstable.
/. would have a sensationalist story title about a MS product. If this was an Apple product, it would say "iBox completely stable".
Shocking, I know, that
WHAAA WHAAA... this is what happens on the internet... this isnt bashing... this the how we find out we are not in the minority. IF Microsoft sees this as an issue they will release a statement... You are just ticked because you couldn't a 360. Admit it, you want to crash it... WOW... you are sick... wanna test software?
Whoa, you must have pretty low expectations in general! When did it become acceptable to buy defective goods, on the presumtion that statistics may be in your favor?
A game console is by no means more complex than e.g. a notebook computer. If any NB manufacturer would ship systems with an out-of-the-box failure rate of 0.2% (which is a fairly optimistic, i.e. low, estimate), then that company would go tits-up in no time.
The weird thing about game consoles is that there are too few makers, limiting severely the choices users have when buying them.
Hey all. I was surfing today and found this site advertising the XBox 360. Apparently if you "Catch the Turkey" you get a chance to WIN an Xbox. With all the hubbub about it being unstable and such, it being something you can win in a TURKEY game seemed hilarious and VERy appropriate to me! Here's the link to the screen shot of the "game" I made. ENJOY! http://www.pixelbypixel.org/images/Catch-the-turke y.jpg
Bill's XBox froze when he demoed it at CES earlier this year, but I can't remember if that was an original XBox or a pre-production 360.
I guess that was an accurate sign of things to come.
Here's a thought: have 360 owners tried blowing on the games?
Per ardua ad astra.
"WHAAA WHAAA... this is what happens on the internet... this isnt bashing... this the how we find out we are not in the minority. IF Microsoft sees this as an issue they will release a statement... You are just ticked because you couldn't a 360. Admit it, you want to crash it... WOW... you are sick... wanna test software?"
ADMIT IT, if Nintendo Revolution, when it launches, is this buggy, THERE WON'T BE A SLASHDOT STORY ENTITLED "NINTENDO REVOLUTION VERY UNSTABLE."
Just admit it.
Let's not jump to such an extreme situation. First, let's say that you had two applicants for the job of, say, dishwasher, and you had planned on paying the increduluous amount of $10/hour for said position. In your interviewing process, you determined that both of the applicants could equally fill the job however, upon asking them what their desired wages were, one of them said $10/hour and the other said $7/hour. Which one would you choose? More importantly, if you chose the latter, would you still offer them what you had originally planned on paying for the position? Most business people that I know would take the person who desired a lower wage and pay them that. Why?
Because one of the downfalls of capitalism is that it treats people - chiefly employees - like commodities to be bought, sold, and found bargains on, instead of humans with hopes, cares, concerns, families, etc. Wal*Mart, anyone? Call bullshit on me? I've seen it over and over again, working for many different companies of all different types, everything from Fortune 500 financial firms, to Mom and Pop development shops. It nearly always comes down to the bottom line and very rarely do things like compassion, respect, and goodwill enter the picture. Idealists learn this the hard way...I know, because I did.
I'm not saying that there's necessarily a better system out there...everything seems to suck. I just can't stand people who rest on capitalism as the end-all-be-all social system (not saying that you necessarily do, I'm just setting up a defence against the would-be flamers).
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
I wonder what the PS3 will be like.
I'm not sure whether this is a problem with hardware or software. If it's a hardware problem then will the PS3 have worse problems?
I ask this because as far as I'm aware they are both based around a similar architecture(PowerPC). Although the Xbox is the less powerful of the two, to gain the christmas market, Sony is pushing the PS3 to the cutting edge of technology. Still it is a bad start for Xbox and does not bode well for the PS3.
I have one of those launch-day PS2s. Yes, I had to have it repaired after about a year because the laser eye would get out of alignment and stop playing games.
But can you imagine having a video game system that HARD CRASHES THE MINUTE YOU GET IT HOME? I mean, seriously, that's a major fuck-up. If I'd been waiting all that time and paid a premium to get my hands on one of these on release day, and then took it home to have it crash 5 minutes my first game and then never boot again? I'd never buy another product from them ever, ever again. There are plenty of other choices (PS2, GC, PS3, Rev)
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Ya, I'd be pissed to. Yes it would be understandable for a small number of these to be defective. You also have to wonder how many units haven't even been tested yet because they are going to be gifts or are being sold unopened on eBay.
"whether or not you crash your rod before the first lap"
I don't believe that has anything to do with racing personally...
Obviosuly someone's bullshit detector is a little anemic today.
My original post should've been modded down as redundant, because I had failed to read the earlier posts. Someone had apparently beaten me to the joke. (that poster got modded a +5 Funny). So, my advice, friend, is take your bullshit detector down to Pep Boys for a little tune-up. My guess would be a faulty Isotrometer, but it's hard to tell without a $90 minimum diagnostic routine.
Sincerely, Manny, Moe and Jack.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Let me see...
:-D
1) Microsoft product - check
2) New version - check
3) Recently lauched - check
What are you guys expecting?
Scientia est Potentia
Nintendo isn't rushing their new console to the market, and has "real" game hardware design experience. Their system won't be unstable, because unlike MS they're taking the sensible and proven route with their new console's components. AND unlike MS, they haven't OVERLY-HYPED their new system by spreading blatant BS about its overall power. Maybe if MS had also taken the humble route and not made so many over-promises, they wouldn't get so much negative attention.
So "NO" Slashdot will not be posting an article about the NR being unstable, because it won't become a reality.
n00bs hate to read the manual.
Older people think they don't need to read it.
Me thinks MS should consider having a single sheet of paper taped to each and every Xbox 360 with stuff like:
"Is it plugged it"
"The password is taupe"
"Ensure proper ventilation"
Anyone who calls customer support and doesn't know the password would get hung up on.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
TV is so 20th century. Get with the times.
If it doesnt work then just send it back in and replace it. I doubt that you will have much trouble once you show that it locks up every time you try to play a certain game. I just bought 4 24" LCD monitors from Dell for work, and one had a huge white line of dead pixels. They sent me a new one, no questions asked, and I went on with my life.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
That is because NINTENDO doesn't have a history of putting under developed, untested systems into production. Microsoft does this all the time. /. is just letting people know that Microsoft screwed up yet again.
If NINTENDO did the same I would expect a lashing from all you XBOX ZOMBIES...
Microsoft is ruining an industry that was created because of NINTENDO and SEGA. They should be punished for these acts.
The only reason Microsoft built a console was to turn capital that was being questioned into an investment. How else can you explain to me that they LOSE MONEY on every unit they sell! Most companies care when they lose money... How many millions or billions has Microsoft lost on the XBOX?
My XBOX 360 was waiting for me when I got home from work last night. I had pre-ordered from EBGames.com and selected next day air shipping. My first 5 hours with the machine were not as smooth as I had hoped.
After getting the old Xbox out of the way and hooking up the component cables, surround sound optical cable, wireless adapter, and ginormous power brick, the first thing I saw on the screen turning it on was an error screen. Black, with E74 in the center bottom - there was some other text as well, but I don't remember what it said and most of it was in another language. Not a great first impression, to say the least. I think the problem was the wireless adapter - I was using the one I bought for my original Xbox. I guess they don't play nice together. I'm not sure why really, I thought it was pretty much equivalent to a wireless bridge. Starting up the console without it plugged in resulted in the startup screen. A big error screen is a pretty harsh welcome - they could have at least set it up to start up the system as normal and then display a friendly error message about having to pony up more money for new accessories: "Sorry. Although your shiny new Xbox 360 might be able to play over 200 legacy Xbox games, the wireless adapter you bought is now just a paperweight with lights." That would be better than E74.
After getting the Xbox on finally, I discovered that turning on the controller is less than intuitive. Batteries are included, and simple enough to insert. There is a nice sticker with the finger-pointing-hand icon pointing right at the Xbox 360 semisphere button. The message was clear enough: "Press this button to make this thing work." Nope. I pressed it. I pressed it again. Nothing. I unwrapped the second controller that EBGames so kindly packaged for me, and had the same result. Those damned things wouldn't turn on - no lights, no nothing. It was several minutes before I discovered that you need to hold the button down for several seconds before controller will turn on. I even resorted to RTFM, and still didn't find this crucial tidbit of info. That sucked for a while.
Played PD0 first - no real issues. When I first inserted Project Gotham Racing, however, I saw a nice error screen that told that in order to play this game I must insert it into a Xbox 360 console. I thought that was what I did, but I ejected it and inserted it again just in case. It played the second time around, but when I was done and ready to try out Call of Duty 2, the Xbox 360 just went to a black screen, not the dashboard. Inserting a new disc did nothing - I tried all 4 of them. I had to turn the console off and back on again before it would recognize a game. What the hell? I felt like blowing on the disc and in the tray for old time's sake.
I could gripe a bit about how counterintuitive it is to get a second player to join in games, but I'll chalk that up to my lack of experience with the new interface...
After wading through most of the nonesense, I had a pretty good time my first night with the new system, but damn was it a rough start. The games are pretty fun (PDZ, PGR3, CoD2, Kameo), but at no time did I feel completely blown away by the graphics or the gameplay. Kameo is probably the best of the bunch. I fully expect to encounter more glitches, but there is little chance that I'll send the system away for repairs at this point when most people can't even get their hands on one until next year. That would just be insensitive.
Why are we talking about NINTENDO anyway... what's wrong? Is your dream system turning into a nightmare... this is about Microsoft... lets stay on the topic instead of talking about a system that doesn't even exist yet.
Atari 2600 the controllers would break right out of the box Commodore64 would stop accepting cartridges after certain games were inserted. Intellevision pads would break ALL the time. Atari Lnyx was know to have an electrical problem w/adapter. NES??? How many cartridges did you have to blow in? Some even brand new... The other stuff I would have to go back and research.... that's just the stuff I remember off the top of my head.
Here's someone who knows what he's talking about. And yes, I too have debugged multi-threaded apps.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Perhaps NT is a bad example.
http://www.looksmartcomputers.com/p/articles/mi_m0 FOX/is_21_4/ai_60301573
Allchin Says NT is Cause of Many Unplanned Reboots - Product Development:
ONCE AGAIN, HERE"S MY ANSWER:
So "NO" Slashdot will not be posting an article about the NR being unstable, because it won't become a reality.
But just to play along with your "unrealistic" scenario, if the NR were plagued with problems like the XBox 1.5, there would definately be an article on Slashdot aobut it. If you think otherwise, then you're in la-la land.
This reminds me of an old Apple ad from '95 or '96...
A presenter at some conference is up on stage having trouble with his slideshow or whatever, apparently the computer's fault, and he blames his new OS, Win95. Various people in the crowd start yelling out advice to try and help him, "check your autoexec.bat", "no, try editing your config.sys" and so on and so on.
Meanwhile a voiceover says "when you want a computer that's easy to use, there's still only one choice..." after which someone in the crowd suggests "Get a Macintosh!".
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
"Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing."
Sony is betting the farm on a lot of market untested technologies, Specifically Bluray. Bluray doesn't nearly have the 5+ years of refinement that DVD has had, and I can bet that looking at a bluray disk funny let alone getting fingerprints or a scratch on the disk will make it very susceptible to read failure. Meanwhile, Nintendo and Microsoft are using much more mature DVD tech, which will pay off with much less failure in the long run.
First of all, Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) discs have become nigh-invulnerable due to a new coating. Supposedly you can literally take steel wool to the discs and not scratch them. Fingerprints also do not hold well on the new material, but even if they did generally they do not cause a problem for readers.
I would also note that DVD technology was still rather new when Sony put it in the PS2, not much further ahead of where the Blu-Ray players will be in six months or so.
Speaking of Bluray, Yes 50GB is great, but show me a game that uses more than 8.5GB.
As noted by another poster, there are a few already. However there is a good reason why you do not see more - because it costs a lot of money to add another disc! The package is more expensive, you double the burning cost, and of course it's a pain to switch discs and most game makers will do anything they can to fit on one disc.
With more space aviliable developers will naturally start using it. How? Don't forget the new consoles support HDR (high dynamic range) which means larger textures. Furthermore with more space you cna ease up on compression (assuming you were compressing some things like audio a lot just to conserve space and not processor power). You can have more FMV (yeah, I know it doesn't really add to a game but still) and more extras like "making of" videos (which are cool).
Now here's the problem facing Microsoft. Next year, game makers will start releasing games that make use of the space availiable on a Blu-Ray disc. Now what happens when a game maker wants to port that to the 360? They have to cram it in a smaller space which means either taking out some stuff or compressing the hell out of it. So shortly after the PS3 launch you will see some game comparisons for cross-platform games noting the 360 looks slightly worse and interpreting that to mean a less powerful system, when in fact all it might be is compression issues!
A console has to stand out for about fpur years, and so generally has some very advanaced technology in it. To use sort of "old" components is to invite system deprication after only a year or so. Just imagine the marketing leverage Sony will have by touting the PS3 as having the next generation of DVD playing in addition to a world-class console that can play the vast library of the PS2 and PS1. How can Microsoft really counter? My guess is they will release an HD-DVD version of the 360 shipping with Halo 3 (on HD-DVD) around the launch of the PS3, but that's going to anger a lot of people if they do so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Microsoft has recently announced a fix to the lockup problem on the Xbox 360. The new Controler-KY will contain CTRL, ALT, and DEL keys. No software fixes are planned as the work around seems to do the job, at the cost of starting over. But it's more cost effective. (this is a joke if you didn't already realise that) Mike
I'm sorry that the X360 isn't performing as MS overly promised, maybe next time they'll actually spend more time on Q&A.
I can only go by past experience and I it's a safe bet that Nintendo a "VETERAN" to game hardware design, who'm already has a PowerPC based game console on the market will ship a working system. They have in the past, so I really don't see why they would abandon their proven commitment to quality this time around.
I have no bias towards MS in peticular, but I do have a bias towards "poor" quality and MEDIOCRITY! MS just happens to fall into that category and their track record can attest to it.
This just proves that the XBox360 is finally a real computer. Console game makers used to go crazy trying to find every bug, because once the game was manufactured, that was it--if it was buggy, nobody wanted to buy it, and you lost your money.
Computer games are different--release something that sort of works, get the money rolling in, then you can issue patches as needed. The XBox360 is designed to be online all of the time. So why bother to get it right the first time?
1.) I hate M$
and
2.) M$ sucks
Well... #1 is subjective, but #2 is definitely objective fact.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
However, out of the 10 people I know personally that picked up a 360 not one has had any crashing or other stability issues.
I figure that God already knows my sins, it's his bailiwick, so I leave it to him and go on about my business.
I'm guessing there's some Zen in the above statement for what it's worth...
...can anyone tell us what the Comedy Manual Phrase is for Xbox 360?
i.e. the warning phrase that is repeated throughout the manual in a worrying but also amusing way.
For Xbox, it was something like "...or the Xbox may fall and injure a small child". (pretty good)
For Dreamcast, it was "...otherwise the Dreamcast may catch fire." (the original, and still the best)
What is it for Xbox 360? :)
The answer you're looking for, is none.
Look at the number of complaints that are from before release date. Those mean that only people who got theirs early are in the pool of availble machines, and thus able to complain about problems. When you see dozens of people complaining about their unit they got early, you have to get suspicious.
If the complaints were all from after the release date, you'd have a point about the ratio of good to bad... But if there's only a few hundred out there, and a few dozen people are bitching, something's wrong.
Either way, time will tell how bad it is, so there's no good reason to speculate.
Because one of the downfalls of capitalism is that it treats people - chiefly employees - like commodities to be bought, sold, and found bargains on, instead of humans with hopes, cares, concerns, families, etc.
An employer doesn't treat people as commodities, but rather their skills. An individual's hopes, cares, concerns, and families are the responsibility of the individual, not of their employer.
Keep in mind that the individual who offered to work for $7/hr was willing to work for that rate. He/she was not forced or lied to in order to work for that rate. You may say, "But you were originally willing to spend $10/hr!". That would only be true if that's what I thought the going rate for the particular skillset was. Suppose you wanted to buy a DVD player and planned to spend $40 for it. Then you see an ad that was selling it for $30. Would you go for the lower price, or would go buy the one that had the price that you were "originally willing" to spend? Remember: retailers have hopes, cares, concerns, and families, too! Are you going to deprive them of those things just because someone else has a sweeter distribution deal?
Wal*Mart, anyone? Call bullshit on me? I've seen it over and over again,
It's not bullshit at all. I've seen it over and over, too. The difference between you and me in this regard is that you choose to bash capitalism when people don't get whatever their "needs" are in a "capitalistic system". (I put that in quotes because I don't regard capitalism as a "system", but rather that thing that exists only when individuals are allowed to exist as free and moral traders.) Remember this: no one is preventing you from helping someone in need. The "conservative" Southern USA gives the most money to charity, year after year, whereas the "liberal" Northeastern USA is the most stingy when it comes to charity.
I'm not saying that there's necessarily a better system out there...everything seems to suck.
Life is hard! I've had two failed businesses in the past year, lost my life savings, and my partner declared bankruptcy. But I'm not going to sit around and whine "everything sucks!" I'm going to get off my ass and keep trying and have a happy life in spite of it all. As a result of my refusal to give up, I have three more businessess in the works with the theory that if I throw enough shit against the wall, something's going to stick, and I'm going to engineer my way out of this pit I find myself in.
And despite how you and I may have differences in values, I wish the same tenacity in the pursuit of happiness for you in your life. Too many people preach doom, guilt, and hate, and it all deserves to go straight into the garbage. May you find a pursuit that you enjoy, make money doing it, develop rich and enjoyable interests, help those whom you love (and whom you think merit help), and live a long and happy life. Happiness is your birthright.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Eh, for a goodie that costs a few hundred bucks I do expect 0% out-of-the-box defect rate; that's what QA is for.
The fact is that MS shipped a relatively small volume (what, maybe half a million at launch?) as of yesterday and if you care to hit google you'll find that the failures are not "anecdotal evidence on Slashdot".
On another topic, you should improve your sarcasm technique, it pretty much sucks.
Xbox team : "We need a crash mode for Gotham racing 3 just like Burn out 3"
developpers : "Are you serious about the crash mode?"
Xbox team : "Ya, put a crash mode in"
developpers : "huh, oh, ok!".
First of all, I didn't curse any anyone.
The name of the topic (thing I replied to) is:
"Xbox 360 very unstable"
I said it is not. And it is not. This guy got a bum unit, like I said. That doesn't mean Xbox 360 is very unstable.
Now, I maybe I could have repeated the topic name before my comment as to it not being true. I could do better.
But you could perhaps at least not curse at people when you're saying they said things they didn't say.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Keep in mind that the individual who offered to work for $7/hr was willing to work for that rate. He/she was not forced or lied to in order to work for that rate. You may say, "But you were originally willing to spend $10/hr!". That would only be true if that's what I thought the going rate for the particular skillset was. Suppose you wanted to buy a DVD player and planned to spend $40 for it. Then you see an ad that was selling it for $30. Would you go for the lower price, or would go buy the one that had the price that you were "originally willing" to spend? Remember: retailers have hopes, cares, concerns, and families, too! Are you going to deprive them of those things just because someone else has a sweeter distribution deal?
This is a bad example due to the imbalance of information and power between the employer and the employee. Therefore it cannot be called capitalism, well more accurately it is not a fair market price. A fair market price could happen if the employee knew what all employers were willing to pay for his service and the employers knew what all employee were willing to work for. The result would be a fair market price.
Of course we don't live in a true capitalist economy where prices are dictated completely by the market. First, there is a minimum wage and other government intervention. Second, in general employers have much more information than employees about market pay rates, and what is others are paying. Not to mention most employers will immediately drop a prospective employee who answers "How much are you willing to work for?" with the question "How much are you willing to pay?" Thereby exacerbating the information imbalance.
That's a weird experience you've had. My 360 (two days old now) has worked great, and my brothers (since last Friday, a Mt. Dew unit) has also. It's ridiculously loud and hot, but what can I do?
I agree the thing about having to log in two people to play two-players games is very very weird. It sure wouldn't work in a kiosk at the store! It does work once you do it though.
All in all, I'm very impressed. The Live integration is great.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Because it's not a free development platform like the PC. The point is control.
The first Xbox 360 I got this morning gave me the meanwhile infamous errors 64 and 65. I've exchanged it and the one I have now is locking up on my in certain situations, sometimes blanking the screen completely and sometimes giving me an E74. This thing is nothing but a piece of crap that obviously hasn't been tested. Sorry, but M$ has fucked up again. Hopefully I'll still be able to get my money back so I can get the PS3 next year...
Is it just me, or are there more people here on slashdot talking about this, than actual posts of the problems on all the sites combined.
Even following the links provided by the poster and visiting MS newsgroups, out of the posts, it looks like there are maybe 100 people at the most that have encountered a problem...
Out of the 'how many units', and this is the number of problems experienced to warrant a SlahDot trash thread?
This is a joke, right? Shall we compaire other product releases, take the iPod, iMac, or many HD units or Dell brands or whatever...
In comparison, this is a significantly small number of problems reported in comparision to the number of units that were purchased.
As a side note, my spouse works in the retail gaming industry, and they have had very little reported problems in comparison to the units they have sold.
For example, PS2s sold last week generate more customer calls and returns for errors and crashing on a percentange then they are seeing with the 360.
Weird uh, after so many years, you would think Sony would have the PS2 hardware problem worked out. (And you would not believe the percentage each store has seen with the PS2 where customers brought back units that literally caught on fire, well smoke at least.)
Get off your we hate everything MS does and think for yourself. Go research this yourself if you are considering one, listening to other slashdotters is 'not' a source for news.
You have the makings of a successful fortune cookie writer!
I've played Gotham on both, and Perfect Dark, and watch War of the Worlds and the new cut of Aliens vs Preditor on them. Neither have crashed. I preordered them from Sam's, and bought the games at Best Buy.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
The Xbox360 really does burn DVDs.
c ds-and-dvds-says-best-buy-138419.php)
(http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/xbox-360/360-burns-
Every store I've been in is completely sold out. Are you saying that you took it back to the store you bought it and they just had another one about and they just took yours and gave another one? Where where where?
And if they are in such abundant supply, how come they're going for 3x list on Ebay (minimum?
Did anyone else notice something on that "Screenshot" link? "Taken with a Sony Cybershot."
A fair market price could happen if the employee knew what all employers were willing to pay for his service and the employers knew what all employee were willing to work for. The result would be a fair market price.
"Fair Market Price" is the price for a commodity/service that compares favorably to the price available from other industry sources. You expand this definition so that the employee must know what ALL employers are willing to pay. This of course is impossible, so you define the employee as being in an "exploited" position. Convenient!
Of course we don't live in a true capitalist economy where prices are dictated completely by the market. First, there is a minimum wage and other government intervention.
I think those things do more harm than good.
Not to mention most employers will immediately drop a prospective employee who answers "How much are you willing to work for?" with the question "How much are you willing to pay?" Thereby exacerbating the information imbalance.
This "information imbalance" you speak of is merely another form of the "oppressive bourgoisie / exploited proletariot" dogma.
I was working a job I hated at 30K/year. Then I was offered a job at 65K/year. I told my boss that I was going to leave, and he begged me to stay. I told him that I was offered a competing deal and they were doubling my salary. He told me that they could do anything except pay me more. Tell me: who was the strong one and who was the weak one in that position? Situations like that happen all the time when the skillset is in high demand. Hence, the skillset fetches high price in the market.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Pfft... my Nintendo 8 bit still works without any glitches !
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
How does an Anonymous Coward mark someone as a foe?
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
[snip]
I think we've found the problem :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
...Xbox180. Turn around right back to the store until version 1.1 comes out. As for Sony Playstation competition, well... do you really want it? I mean, connected to your home network and everything? CDs?
That's all the time final testing bay did at the Xbox 360 facilities. How else would you explain how this 'overheating' problem is really a result of accidentally sprayed power prongs. Word is, wipe the prongs off good, and it fixes the problem.
The problem is that the prongs were coated with some sort of silicon spray and it introduces just enough resistance to prevent enough current from getting to the unit. 10 minutes probably wouldn't be enough time to discover this since you really have to crank up the processor and components for a while to properly test for this...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
looks to me a hardware glitch not a software glitch. Probably overheated in some case.
Honestly, its made by Micro$oft. I'm just surprised that they dont have a blue screen of death feature. Maybe it will come in an xbox live upgrade :D
Admit it.
Capitalism under ideal circumstances should be a very good thing, however there are many problems with capitalism in real life.
1. Market failures. There are many ways which prevent competition and free market from working. Monopolies, cartels, couple of companies dominating market (ATI+nvidia). All of those screw up the life of people (consumers) and entrepreneurs trying to make/sell something new/better.
2. Corporations have vested interest in making people (consumers) easily brainwashed/dumb mob. And with TV and other means of mass media it is quite easy to do.
3. Customers are misinformed on purpose (marketing) and cannot make rational decision on which product to buy. This distorts free market, and decreases competion based on product.
4. Publicly traded corporations have behavioral model of a psycho. CEO MUST increase profit at all cost, or he'll be removed and replaced by one who does. The only thing stopping corporations from selling babies is law, or more precisely, there would be too much risk and too little profit to do that. Screw the law is the risks are low and the profits are high, and you have enough money for lobbying. Publicly traded Corporations as an entity DO NOT AND CANNOT HAVE MORALS.
5. Corporations usually have hierarchical control structure. Big corporations are dictatorships inside democratic society.
I think capitalism with very very well protected competition and free market, and very very well informed and educated consumers is something awesome, but reality is much worse.
--Coder
when i first heard about xbox and microsoft....i thought of windows and its bugs... i thougth omg! my console is gonna freeze! and i guess i was right! i have both an xbox and a ps2 but i really preffer the ps2 i have a lot more games to play and they dont make you pay more for retrocompatibility :P
I cant wait for ps3!
I am glad I decided to wait until spring before deciding between the 360 and the PS3. I would be pissed if I spent $400 plus $60 per game only to discover all these crashes, overheating, and bugs, and realize that Microsoft left no time for themselves to do proper quality control before launch and I am now serving as their guinea pig. I never buy at launch because the second wave of console manufacturing is less likely to be buggy.
But that's not what I meant. Want to construe my words a way they weren't and call me a liar over it? Go ahead. But such comments are meaningless since that isn't what I meant.
I meant that the title of the topic "Xbox 360 Very Unstable" isn't correct. And you said why yourself, just because some people report crashing doesn't mean as a whole it is very unstable. I'll tell you what, I'll bring the subject up when I'm racing on PGR3 on Live later today. We'll all get a good chuckle over it is my guess.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
First off, if these machines are breaking within the first few minutes/hours doesn't this tell you that the Quality Checking that MS is doing is rather substandard? Second, how many of these XBOX 360's have gone straight to a closet and won't be opened until Christmas Day? I'll expect a lot more news about this come christmas! And third. If this is the usual/expected kind of problems from this kind of technology then MS would have been prepared to fix these problems, right? Call 1-800-4my-xbox and see how long you have to wait on the phone! If these where expected problems wouldn't they be answering the phone a lot quicker? (My wait time was over 1/2 hour at 8am pst, i don't have an xbox, i was just curious). Either way, i'm not surprised if MS is shipping garbage, this is how they usually work.
This story is now on the front page of Google News and other large news sources.. I can't help but picture the furniture flying in Redmond right now. It can't be pretty.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
It's a Sony Root Kit Monster! This? In My Hand? Oh, it's nothing.....
We Three Red Lights
We three red lights are;
Bearing destruction, we traverse afar,
Field and fountain, moor and mountain,
Following yonder Ring of Light.
O red light of wonder, red of light,
Red ever so bright,
Westward venturing, not proceeding,
Guide us to thy perfect green light.
Born on the pre-order plain
Games I bring to it again,
Power forever, ceasing never,
Over us all to play.
Fans to offer have I;
String owns a power supply high;
Frustration and pleading, voices raising,
Cursing on high.
Three red lights flashing mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes death of gathering gloom;
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone cold tomb.
Glorious before, now behold it not arise;
Toil and sacrifice;
Anguish, Anguish,
Sounds through the earth and skies.
i am not saying they deserve it, but it is not like we have not seen this before. anybody reading Slashdot should realize the system is fucked, especially when it comes to Micro$oft products. Are they ever good out of the box? i personally don't have any installed on any of my machines (Macs), and if i did it would probably be some old version of excel i needed 10 years ago for a class.
something as focused and dedicated as a game system should be easier to make work properly. it is a pretty closed system at this point so they *should* have known there were issues, unless it is just quality control and the few that slipped through are getting a ton of attention. even the local even news here devoted 15 or 20 seconds to it.
i have more leniency for something like a laptop that may be subject to 3rd party devices and software and exposed to environmental conditions (and users) they did not simulate in the lab.
You've (potentially inadvertently) equated "equivocate" and "equate".
you had me at #!
Gah. Idiot. If you're going to make a joke about the Konami code, at least get it right.
It's Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A B A
http://undecidedgames.blogspot.com
Yet another construct of functional programming languages is simulated by C++ for use in the latest consoles...
Not sure if this is confirmed to be related to the orientation of the console (vertical vs. horizontal), but I know of several local gamers who are having problems with scratched game discs. My coworker stopped by one of the local gaming stores this weekend and ran into an irate gamer who showed an actual disc that was scratched -- it's bad, too. A perfect circle gets carved into the surface of the game disc.
Anyone running into this issue with the Xbox 360 should try laying the console flat instead of standing it on its end (the way most ads depict the system). Not sure if that will actually help, but it can't hurt at this point.
Considering that many of the games retail for $60 a pop, I'm amazed people are actually running out and buying replacements when this disc scratching issue comes up.
OK, for the umpteenth time, say it with me now: The Xbox 360 CPU, code named Xenon, is not a PPC970. It is a custom triple-core processor that shares little in common with the PPC970 except an instruction set. The architecture is completely different.
For an excellent overview of the Xenon, please see ArsTechnica's article. Each core on the Xenon has a different number of execution units from the PPC970 core, and the pipelines are deeper in the Xenon to accommodate higher clock speeds. The Xenon also lacks out-of-order execution, which is a key feature in the PPC970.
The Sempron is an IA32 processor (x86 instruction set; not sure if the Sempron includes x86-64 instructions or not, or which versions). Microsoft made a clear decision to abandon x86 processors in favor of PowerPC for their gaming consoles. PowerPC chips can be made very energy efficient -- just look at the latest G4 processors from Freescale -- but for high performance and high clock speeds, power consumption needs to increase too.
Generally, we agree on this point. However, if a manufacturer markets a product specifically for general living room use, but then seriously caveats that in a manual inside the factory-sealed packaging, arguably to limit liability for a design flaw, that is not the consumer's fault, in my opinion.
e m/xbox360/connect-positionconsole.htm
Nowhere in the literature does it say to place the product in the living room. It isn't specifically marketed for the living room. It isn't specifically marketed for any room. I haven't yet seen an advertisement that displays it in a living room. I wouldn't be surprised if people are putting them on their desktop next to their computer, to be honest. (That's where I have my Playstation 2)
The information about console placement is available online, in addition to being in the manual.
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/getstarted/syst
Not doing product research before buying a product is the consumer's fault. Not reading the manual after buying the product is also the consumer's fault. This is more an instance of dumb consumers than "Microsoftness" as people are playing it up to be. If people would do adequate product research before buying, they wouldn't buy a console that won't fit in their entertainment unit or work in their living room or operate from their carpeted bedroom floor. Then, Microsoft would notice their sales not going so well and they'd adjust the system accordingly.
I'm not advocating the console by any means; for the reasons highlighted (can't be used in a living room or put in a conventional entertainment center, overheats easily (what happens this summer?)) and because it's $500+ it's a huge "DO NOT BUY" for me. What I am saying, though, is that people have had ample opportunity to discover the caveats to owning a 360 both before and after purchase and yet they appear to be ignoring those opportunities, which is the hallmark of a dumb consumer.
My standpoint would be totally different if everybody read the product literature first and there was a shitstorm about the positioning requirements from people who had not yet bought the console and who were complaining that it won't work from the floor or in their entertainment unit.
The ability to just buy something, plug it in, and have it work hassle-free is only ever realised when you're working with a Macintosh or a toaster. Most people can't even program their own VCR, yet the expect to be able to take highly sophisticated technology (at a cost 3 to 5 times that of a VCR), plug it in, and have it work instantly without educating themselves first. I think that is a totally unreasonable expectation, the expectation of a dumb consumer.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Nowhere in the literature does it say to place the product in the living room. It isn't specifically marketed for the living room.
Oh? You sure?
I haven't yet seen an advertisement that displays it in a living room.
Really? Then let me help you out.
Remember this site? Check out the pull-quote on this page, and the even more prominent highlight on this page. I found them in less than 2 minutes of navigating focused on hardware and multimedia. Sometimes irony can bite you in the ass, my friend.
I wouldn't be surprised if people are putting them on their desktop next to their computer, to be honest. (That's where I have my Playstation 2)
So, you really think that's what all those folks with widescreens & front projectors in their family rooms will be doing, eh? You just stick with that then, don't let me tell you different.
This is more an instance of dumb consumers than "Microsoftness" as people are playing it up to be.
Hey, MS hasn't cornered the market on design blunders. I've got nothing against them specifically, but I think this does provide a good example of a fumbled product specification. Blame consumers if you like, but you've said nothing convincing me that this case is a consumer problem. It's a home entertainment center component, and it doesn't fit well in that environment. That's pretty flawed, from any angle.
The ability to just buy something, plug it in...VCR...
You keep using VCRs as the benchmark you believe people are holding to the XBox360. It's a little goofy to believe that folks dropping upwards of five bills on an HD/5.1 game console are VCR people. VCRs do neither HD or 5.1 out, and probably won't even share space with the Xbox360 in most HD home setups.
However HD DVRs/TiVos, HD cable/sat boxes and DVD players do (well standard DVD is SD [480p] but some upconvert to 1080i/720p). On technologically and cost, HD DVRs compare very well with the XBox360. But they don't tend to overheat when placed near other AV devices. Funny, that.