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Xbox 360 To Have IPTV, 10 Million Sold
The news from CES, from Bill Gates' keynote, is that the 360 will have IPTV rolled out in an update later this year. They've also now crossed the 10 Million units sold mark, spurred on by Gears of War in the U.S. and Blue Dragon in Japan. The implications of IPTV for the 360 (DVR on a 20 gig HD, essentially) are interesting, but are hardly the only news to come out of the event. Robbie Bach gave Gamespot an overview of Vista and 360-related announcements for the near future, and there's some great stuff in there. Likewise, Mr. Gates sat down for an interview with several journalists, including Dean Takahashi from the Mercury News and Brian Crecente from Kotaku. He gives some additional insight into the company's announcements at the CES event.
With the announcement of DVR, a larger Hard Drive is practically confirmed. Microsoft has been on a roll lately as far as the Xbox 360 is concerned, I doubt they would forget something like that. They are probably waiting until the last moment to announce it to prevent a drop in sales.
Micro Center has been offering a $100 rebate on Xbox 360 units since early Autumn, if not before that. I got my 360 premium system for $300 sometime in September I think. Anyway this was definitely not a case of increasing incentives in time for the holiday season or in response to a sudden desperate need to meet some projected numbers.
So, there was no "BIGGER" loss. It was the same as usual, Micro Center just increased its advertising during the holiday season, much like everyone else.
I like basketball!!1!
That is really odd. Since the US an Canada are so close in law I am surprised that they have these issues.
Of course before the free trade laws I had one of the dumbest discussion in my life with a Canadian official.
The government of Canada uses a piece of software I work on. Back before the Internet we used to ship them updates in the mail. Well one of the disks got stopped because of taxes!
The tax official wanted to know what the value of the disks was so they could charge the customer tax on the import.
Well the update was free but that wasn't good enough for them. I then asked them why they needed to charge the customer tax since the customer was the government of Canada! I mean they would be billing themselves... I never got the answer and they sent the disk back. That day we set up a BBS so they could download the updates from that day forward.
You got to love governments
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I've got the 360, Gears, Live Gold, and I'm a developer (not for Microsoft), so I've had Vista for a little bit now, and I have to say, I keep hearing a lot of nay-saying, but it's pretty damned slick, it's integrated and for the most part it works rather well...by "it" I mean the 360 (on 65" 1080i) for both games and media center...it automagically picked up my media that I shared through vistas new local area media sharing and allows me to play all my stuff through the xbox (with the normal wireless controller, no way I'm spending $125 on a remote control). I have 3 complaints...
.net 1.0 (hello? I have 3.0 biatch) I have yet to get this working and it sounds like my options are: convert all my movies to an acceptable format (thats way too much porn), or find an on-the-fly conversion streamer that installs on vista (all 3rd party and ghetto at first glance)...alas I have yet to be able to watch porn, only my buddy's wedding :(
#1 Divx movies do not stream to the 360 without some 3rd party add-ons to media center edition...unfortunately they're geared towards xp media center 2005 edition, not vista...the installer for what is touted as the best (MCEEncoder?)won't install on vista because it claims I don't have
#2 Did I mention the remote control is is a Buck Twenty Five? You've GOT to be shitting me. Not only is that ridiculous, it's IR only, sure you can probably program it to run your stereo, but it should work via radio to interact with the 360, from what I hear it does not...not really inspiring me to shell out $125.
#3 I can't link it to my Comcast DVR and playback my media from there...I know it's a stretch. This new solution is great and all, if it works good, I haven't converted my income to Microsoft Money yet, so I couldn't tell ya.
Anyhow, I'm totally impressed, I LOVE the way media extender works (except for porn so far), the games and graphics kick ass, and if Zune was more of an origami device that extended games from the 360 to a vista umpc...cream dream.