Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Owns Up To 360 Defects
Next Generation reports on Microsoft's acceptance of responsibility for early 360 defects. While originally claiming that system failures were well within the norm for consumer electronics, they've now adopted a more service-friendly attitude. From the article: "Upon further investigation, it was further discovered that the bulk of the units were isolated to a group that was part of the initial manufacturing run of the console. Returns for repair are coming in for a variety reasons and it's a higher rate than we are satisfied with. We've made the decision to comp repairs for consoles manufactured before January 1, and provide refunds to the small group of customers who have already paid for repairs."
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
unless they mean 360 defects in DOS 1.0.
Small refunds? I doubt it'll be anywhere near the cost and hassle of having their expensive console fixed. At least Microsoft is owning up to it's crap though.
I just received in the mail, 6 months late, my warranty I purchased the day I bought my 360. If I get free repairs now then shouldn't they give me my money back on that warranty?
Actually, while we are on this topic, the phrase is not just "owns up" but "owns up to" which could replaced by "admits" or the other words you suggested.
Last time I heard, they had thousands of defects...
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
There isn't much information to be found there. However, I am quite curious what the "red rings of light" turned out to be. I know that the 360 had heat problems, but was the case red hot or something?
That was the hardware. Now why don't they fix their crappy media center so that it will allow the 360 to play anything other than WMV and MPEG? There's this container format called AVI. Hello, Microsoft? Have you heard of it?
No, Transcode360 (or any form of transcoding) isn't good enough.
Slagborr
> We've made the decision to comp repairs for consoles manufactured before January 1,
"comp" is a verb? Since when? Perhaps it's a Microsoft patented word, like IsNot?
I've got to say I was surprised and disappointed when I heard their story. But then again, I find the idea that MS considers a 1 in 20 defect rate of boxes in the hands of the consumer abysmal. Stuff happens, but that's just pathetic.
One more reason for me to wait for a redesign of the unit or a re-spin of the silicon to a smaller process. Maybe by then things will be better.
I've never had problems with my XBox (non-360). I've never had problems with any of my consoles (even my initial batch PS and PS2s).
Anyone know Dell's defect rate (hardware only, in the first year)? I can't possibly be as bad as MS claims is OK (5%) or what they actually have (15%).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Then buy something else that does exactly what you're looking for. Oh, you can't find one you say. Yeah imagine that. So you want AVI support, despite the seemingly endless number of new codecs that are required for that format. You'll complain when you download an AVI and the codec is not available. I'd like my 360 to cook me breakfast in the morning... eggs. Ever heard of that Microsoft. I want eggs support. Get on it.
The article makes it sound very mysterious, but it seems like the "red ring of light" is just the LEDs on the power switch changing from green to red, indicating a hardware failure. It's been nicknamed the Red Ring of Death.
If you all Google Slashdot, will it Slashdot Google?
I don't own one, but I'd imagine that there are a number of early adopters out there, that are pretty upset now. They bought one of the first batches, it failed a while later and because I'm assuming that most early adopters were enthusiasts, they probably bought a new one when the old didn't have warranty anymore. Those people of course don't get any compensation from Microsoft, even though they admit now that it was basically their fault...
Why didn't this make the front page, especially considering all the slashdot stories about xbox 360 problems?
Maybe because the important stories are about microsoft's fuckups while the unimportant ones are those where they acknowledge their problems and address them.
Regardless, shouldn't this info be given the frontpage considering all the apparent 360 owners who are fixing their problems with strings, etc., and who could use the free service or refund?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
This is Slashdot, right? There are a lot more than 360 defects with Microsoft. "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all" doesn't happen by itself.
Yeah, we know what they mean and it's bullshit. Of all the brick style power supplies and wall warts you have owned, how many ever melted? None? That's what most people would say because melting is not normal for consumer electronics. That M$ managed to ship one that did means they shorted several qualifying steps required for a UL listing with obviously dangerous results. Once again they suck, they don't care and they are going to lie to you about it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You should start with criticizing shakespeare he used quite a few lesser known phrases, not to mention extraneous words. Shit, I bet you hate his writing, you literary scholar,you.
They've done this kind of thing atleast once before with the 360, though not publically as far as I know. I bought a 360 around new years, and since I didn't get an extended warranty (although hat was probably a little stupid), it fell out of warranty about the end of March. Back in July, I think it was, they released a big new feature filled patch (the one with background downloading, finally). A few days after that, my 360 started locking up and then showing the Red lights. A little browsing the internet later, I found out quite a few other people had had similarly coincidental hardware failures. After a quick talk with their tech support, I ended up getting the 360 replaced for free, despite it being out of warranty.
It's good to see MS officially admitting that there were hardware problems a large portion of the launch units and fixing them, just like any recall of a deffective product is a good thing to see.
Please perform a checksum on "comp" and "complimentary", and perhaps you'll find they are comp-letely different. Thereby, none is comprehended as brevity when confusing butchery to a word with a word that only exists in the mind of USians. The only moments a non-word are used in the form of a sentance is when conferring the said intellectual property and patent on that trademark word, for use in negotiation. USians are constontantly trying to renegotiate the English language to everyone's despair.
And in response to the parent post, yea "iSNot" is a trademark of Apple. I think this is the proverbial drip into the lap that our pal "kfg" could be referring to. I suppose I should buy one of those Apple iBox products that I've been seeing advertised on CARTOON NETWORK. They only thing is they only talk about how great the iBox truly is at gaming, without opening the iBox or interfacing it to any activity other than to stare at the iBox. I wouldn't be surprised if they payed a couple hundred dollars more than was the Nintendeo GameCube, only for the few non-poseurs to mod a slit in their iBox to modify it; and they'll probably find there are either tissues for the iSnot or maybe there is a trademarked non-SGI Brick inside.
Is Steve Jobs french, does any one know? I'm seeing a lot of redundancy with Apple recently, as well as Nintendo. It was just months ago that I saw a Wii stuffed in their GameCube. What could be hiding in the legendary iBox, I wonder? And what about the "iSNot" as well?
Sincerily not Apple,
M. Gregory Thomas for
our Network Redundancy Administration
without prejudice
USians are constontantly trying to renegotiate the English language to everyone's despair.
It's a nasty habit we picked up from the British. Myself I like to read people like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Kipling, Carroll and Milne. You wouldn't believe the crap they pull on a perfectly good language.
They've been a terrible influence on me.
KFG
t's a nasty habit we picked up from the British. Myself I like to read people like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Kipling, Carroll and Milne. You wouldn't believe the crap they pull on a perfectly good language.
They've been a terrible influence on me.
That's the joy of claiming the rites to such an inflection, because the owner may decide how people may pronounce the mark or what they may think it to mean. That's why many of the national corporations at the localities in America deceiving the People that they are found in the original charters, so much of COURT(inc) writes incorrect English as to have the copyright on said commercial speach while in the Court among inferiors/courts jousting their attorney about another's.
The source controlls the meaning, and when one source appears as similar to another then the dispute is whether they are independent of one-another by conscience or conciously unaware of one-another. Of course, that's somthing I talk about on various research that can show the difference between this "kfg" from that "kfg", and how they enter forum in agreement to bear witness of the kfg as heralded KFG. In that modus, most intellectual property rules can be overturned by the law.
I was teaching some children the other-day on negotiable instruments and how they are adapted to school "assignments." I thought it quite hillarious how children could dispute what they swear as true on their assignments (answer) or renegotiating the intent of a "scansheet" or otherwise that presents copyright information and trademarks as a lesson. My previous post was tried to set you up with a few entries to jest at my expense, but I didn't find any wit in your response. Perhaps I should have given you permission to the meaning of my non-errors in spelling words indifferently.
By the way, did you find any correlation in the stretched words found in your favourite subjective text in the titles revealed to me above?
without prejudice
about 1990-1992 or so, i worked for a regional retailer that sold computers, printers, etc from a number of vendors including hp, ibm, toshiba, epson. one of the problems we had was a high rate of doa equipment from ibm. we felt that the doa rate was too high, especially on monitors and printers. an ibm rep said that the proprinter doa rate was only 2%. 2 out of a hundred. i mentioned that any company making tvs or vcrs would be out of business with a 0.02 out of box failure rate. the rep seemed to think that 2% was O.K. they had a high rate of problems with monitors too. the 8513 ended up with a 4 year warranty. but what was one of the most gross failures of customer support that i ever saw was when ibm decided to not do immediate replacement of doa monitors. if you paid (a lot of money) for your monitor, took it home, opened up the box, plugged it in, and it didn't work, too bad. you brought it back and it was sent away for warranty work. which was several days to a week.
ibm reps never understood why a customer would get stuff other than ibm. even when we told them about stuff like this. they lived in their own little world until it imploded.
it seems that when companies get 'so' big, there seems to be warping of reality for them. i would bet there are some people at microsoft that were very unhappy to admit to this.
e
because their homes burned down due to the faulty PSU's. I don't know how the smell of charring carpet could have escaped Microsoft's QA, but it sure did. For shame.
Haha you Brits lost all rights to the language the moment you started lauding a compilation of dick and fart jokes (Canterbury Tales) as quality English writing. ;)
Honestly.
The single biggest thing that turned me off of Microsoft was the refusal to admit their mistakes. When I worked as a tech support rep for business clients, I can't even begin to count the number of times that I'd research a bug to find a MS knowledgebase article claiming ``this behavior is by design'' meaning it was a defect that they never intended to fix.
If they had openly admitted their defects, strove to correct them and offerend replacement/refunds consistently, there wouldn't be so many people in the anti-MS camp.
Quality English writing? Shit, I just read it for dick and fart jokes.
KFG
Yah, becoz their iz loik in USA! every1 is loik Sheikspeer lol
Internet: Bringing us new ways to express ourselves since the first dude said "fuck it, I'm not going to spellcheck this crap" and pressed "SEND"
red rings of light = loose/cold solder joints....
have you seen the reflow video on youtube?
they use a hot air gun to heat up the 360 mobo, and then it starts working again.
and my box was made in feb20/2006 - _after_ the january "early adopter" phase...
(my code was 0100, many others have the 0102 code...)
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
oh yeah,
:)
on the xbox.com forums
on the thread where everyone was complaining about the rings o death...
(this was an 8 page thread, with lots of info and data about people's 0102 and 0100 code related deaths)...
someone posted the video of the "hot air gun" motherboard fix... (presumably reflowing bad solder joints)
next...
m$ support posted they don't recommend people fixing their own box.
then...
the entire thread was removed.
mysteriously....
(i also heard m$ had trouble with the new RoHS process that was just introduced recently...)
don't you love hearsay and speculation?
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
ABOUT FUCKING TIME.
and they damn well deserve it for rushing the thing out in the first place, the Xbox 1 is only 4 and a bit years old, don't fuck your first adopters by releasing it's replacement so quickly and dropping the original like a bag of shit with no support anymore.
Even Sony damn well supported the PS1 pretty well after the PS2 came out.
Fuckers.
Would have been really nice if Sony would have done something similar with my original Playstation and original PS2 that both died well before their time. Or at least owned up that their consoles were plagued with problems. But wow, issuing checks to people who sent in their console for repair? Hats off to MS. I've sworn off of buying any first gen sony product after my multiple psx and ps2 systems. I was sworn off of first gen MS systems (not that I'm interested in the x-box much to begin with), but come NEXT generation (whenever that may be), if MS is in a better market position I'd be much less hessitant to buy their first gen console after this.
Why can't MS and Sony take a lesson from Nintendo? They're the only company that actually spends time engineering hardware that actually works. Only bad Nintendo experience I've ever had was the horrible N64 controller. I was lucky if one of those lasted me longer than a month.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
so everytime somebody creates a new funky code that is used in an an AVI you'd need a new codec on that if it were to be natively decoded on that.
Transcoding (lossless) is a much better solution - you know it plays on your PC - you know it'll stream across exactly the same to any extender you have. I only want to have to install codecs in one place and I'm sure MS aren't falling over themselves to let every codec maker install their stuff on their lovely 360s.
Current problem is that all we have is Transcode360 (which I much appreciate and even donated against) - isn't perfect and is very much bolted on. If MS wrote a transcoder themselves, then it could work much much better - for example not just transcoding the whole file start to end and presenting that to the extender, it could allow you to skip about through the file just as you would do normally and just transcode the part you want to view (rather than waiting for your PC to trundle through the file from the start every time).
Shakespeare was a journalist? I never knew that.
Returns for repair are coming in for a variety reasons and it's a higher rate than we are satisfied with.
Shouldn't it be "a higher rate than our customers were satisfied with"? They're playing it off as if they're doing it out of the kindness of their own hearts. Sure, they could easily screw the customer and not extend their warranties, but then a lot of those would throw out their XBox 360 and buy a Wii or PS3. Why give themselves more headaches by throwing money at what appears to be a money pit?
Only one wall wart I ever owned melted: one for a Sears Telegames unit (aka Atari 2600, rebranded) vintage 1978 and it nuked in 1980 after two years of service.
I own a 360 (and have never had any problems with it). I appreciate that MS rushed production to get it out a year earlier than the other systems, as I was jonesing for a new system. I also appreciate that this rush is what produced the defective hardware. Although the delay in compensation for repairs denotes a greedy attitude on the part of MS, I am not surprised. Corporations do not exist to serve the public good, and if you find this objectionable, then please avail yourself of a microeconomics textbook. You can't expect good intentions from corporations (and from people in general). You should be satisfied that they do the right thing, even if for the wrong reasons.
Having worked for several years, I understand how difficult it is to design products, let alone systems. Even with the best gameplan, you will spend most of your time debugging and firefighting. Hence the emergence of "in-programming", which since MS is eating all of the costs of repairs to defective 360s, is essentially what they did when designing the hardware. Put another way, would you rather wait an extra year for a rock-solid 360, or get one a year earlier, which will probably work fine, but may not, in which case you get a working one for no extra cost?
MS is a decent corporation with decent products. It could be better, but it could be way worse. The people who run it are not evil or contemptible. They are extremely busy and are trying to balance a lot of competing forces when developing and marketing products. Don't criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes.
Slashdot is a great site, but the inane and repititious MS-bashing here really brings it down.
Nice apologist tract. Let's deconstruct this, shall we?
...over some of them EXPLODING?
/end sarcasm/
> I appreciate that MS rushed production to get it out a year earlier than the other systems, as I was jonesing for a new system. I also appreciate that this rush is what produced the defective hardware.
So, in other words, Micro$oft is at it again: they rush a product through production, get it to market before it's ready, and -- what a surprise! -- it's got nasty bugs in it. Summary: M$ fucks things up some more.
> Although the delay in compensation for repairs denotes a greedy attitude on the part of MS, I am not surprised.
At this point, I'd be amazed if *anyone* was surprised.
> Corporations do not exist to serve the public good, and if you find this objectionable, then please avail yourself of a microeconomics textbook. You can't expect good intentions from corporations (and from people in general). You should be satisfied that they do the right thing, even if for the wrong reasons.
Translation: what the corporations offer the public is all they deserve, and if they don't like it they can go fuck themselves. Wonder if this 'primeval_badger' character is a Republican or a Libertarian -- what's his view on public oversight or government regulation of business? That should be good for a cheap laugh....
> Having worked for several years, I understand how difficult it is to design products, let alone systems.
Then you understand the importance of "defensive design" and "quality control", right? Because M$ apparently doesn't, seeing that they repeatedly and consistently release products that are Not Ready For Prime Time. Hell, it's no wonder my first software engineering professor got so pissed off at fuckheads like this, for creating sloppy design and shoddy quality, that it made him "want to get a baseball bat and start bashing in heads."
> Put another way, would you rather wait an extra year for a rock-solid 360, or get one a year earlier, which will probably work fine
-- unless the power supply unit undergoes a meltdown, explodes and sets fire to the carpet, which burns down the house and potentially nearby houses as well. Think I'm being over the top? Remember that little fuss a short while ago over laptop batteries? You know
http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/22/another-thinkpa d-battery-explodes/
But hey, what's a few exploding laptops, right? I mean, the user escaped with only minor burns and a ruined LCD monitor (other than the laptop screen itself), plus the firefighters came in time, so he should count himself lucky! Hell, he's even got backups of his data, so he should be *satisfied* that things turned out the way they did!!
> MS is a decent corporation with decent products.
Ahem... You seem to have contradicted your earlier statement about the nature of corporate business. More importantly, it flies in the face of the public record:
http://www.microsuck.com/content/whatsbad.shtml
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=640
http://www.inlumineconsulting.com:8080/website/msf t.shilling.html
> Don't criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes.
You forgot to add, "or unless you can outdo him."
Remember Bill Gates' infamous letter to the Homebrew Computer Club? The one in which he said to the club that "most of you steal your software"? What he neglected to mention in that letter was:
- Altair BASIC was released way behind schedule (dude, talk about foreshadowing!)
- Many Altair computer users had paid in advance for pre-ordered copies of Altair BASIC, yet had never received it
-
"All hands, BRACE FOR IMPACT!"
I recently had mine repaired for the 3 red lights. I just read this and called the support line to ask for my refund. No problem at all - verified my reference number and they are cutting a refund check. Definitely a good move for MS, this type of service is pretty rare in my view.