Slashdot Mirror
New Parental Controls Limit Xbox Time
An anonymous reader writes "As part of a new marketing blitz to promote the Xbox 360 as a "family friendly" video game console, Microsoft on Wednesday rolled out a new feature called Family Timer, which will show up in the Family Settings Screen.
The Timer will let parents limit the number of hours their kids can play the Xbox on a daily or weekly basis. When the time limit is reached, the console will automatically shut off, ostensibly after saving the game."
It must be really nice to live in a household where one parent earns enough so that the other can stay at home at all times.
It's not only good for parents. It's also good for those of us who have busy schedules and short attention spans...set the timer to 1 hour, play away, and no risk of losing track of the clock. I learned this with WoW.
Ride the skies
Actual software quality aside, I'd hope Microsoft is using its experience with OSes to implement this sudden shutdown has a suspend-to-disk type operation (or suspend to RAM if all else fails) - many games aren't designed around constant save points, and if these things are going to throw away hours of hard-earned work, I can see tons more kids going postal in the future :/
Reports show the son became enraged, went through the house looking for the air card, and then punched his mother, prompting the parents to call the Sheriff's Office.
After the boy retreated to his bedroom and locked it, the mother knocked on the door and told him he needed to come out and talk to the deputies, the report stated. But the juvenile allegedly responded with profanity.
Harnage and another deputy entered the room using a key from the parents to arrest the son, according to the report. The son fought the deputies - at one time punching Harnage on the lip - until they handcuffed him. www.sun-sentinel.com
The ironic thing is that any parent that's self-excusing enough to want to use parental controls rather than take responsibility for what Junior can and can't do will be just as likely to consider it Microsoft's fault that they got punched in the face by their own child for activating one of Microsoft's features. Rather than take the blame for raising a brat, why not just sue? It's the American way.
Now you want truly un-American thinking? Release a treadmill or other exercise equipment that can be set to automatically give the little tubs o' lard more game time in exchange for actually exercising.
In my day, we had to run ten miles up hill before we were allowed to call the other kids "teh gey" on Halo. And we were grateful!
Hehe, been there, not all that long ago even (she's 2 now), and yes, if you're lucky things improve dramatically. Maybe we got lucky, but 20:00 in bed and not a whisper until 10:00 the next morning is "normal" here...
(for the critics around here : yes, that's in weekends only... Now I come to think about it, I should have somehow put in my contract that the firstborn would replace the alarm or something; don't think the boss will agree on it now anymore =)
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
Lets face it, if you need the help of a machine to deal with a child, you are a miserable failure.
Oh come on. These type of posts on Slashdot crack me up. The "be a super-parent FFS!" type of post. The problem with "parenting" is not that people rely on machines to enforce rules, the problem is the lack of firm rules. You just need to watch an episode of Super Nanny to know what time it is, that is, a lot of children don't have any fixed set of rules, they can do whatever they want and it makes them very unhappy. In the real world, most people are far from being perfect parents, and they have trouble getting their authority respected. Such solutions help with that, by firmly enforcing rules that parents don't manage to enforce this firmly on their own.
By the way, that's "of course", not "offcourse".
You just got troll'd!
That sounds contradictory to me. If the parents are responsible enough to talk with and come to an agreement with their kids about playtime, it doesn't sound like they'd be the type of parents who'd ignore their kids once the timer kicked in. Seems to me that the parents likely to abuse the timer as you describe are the type who without the timer would just let the kids play as long as they like without supervision, or arbitrarily and unilaterally decide when the kids can and can't play. The timer wouldn't appear to have a net negative impact on any of these individual cases. (Well, the kids may think it's a net negative.)
What is the world coming to. Slashdot is turning into parents-exchange :-) I know, we've got a 3.5 year old one too, in addition to the 8month old twins. You -could- choose to say that things where hmm, lively, with us for a while.
The twins are 8 months now, and it's a different world. One in which they go sleep at 7pm and sleep calmly until 6am.
Muhahahahahahaha....
Just wait...
Mini-me #2 did that for a while, then at about 14 months old, he figured out how to climb out of the crib. Or, more accurately, he learned to scale up to the top rail and fall out of the crib, with a most impressive thud, followed by much howling and screaming.
But, you're not really a parent until that oh so special bundle of love and fuzziness hits you in the head with a sippy cup that you'd swear was thrown by Randy Johnson, then giggles like hell and says 'Daddy Funny.'
I hear voices, and they don't like you