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Xbox Originator: "Stupid, Stupid Xbox!!"
Freshly Exhumed writes "You can't begrudge Nat Brown for claiming some pride in the birth of Microsoft's game console: 'I was a founder of the original xBox project at Microsoft and gave it its name. Almost 14 years after the painful, pointless, and idiotic internal cage-match to get it started and funded, the hard selling of a compelling and lucrative living-room product to Bill (and then Steve as he began to take over), a product that consumers would want and love and demand, I am actually still thrilled to see how far it has come...' But in his recent ILIKE.CODE blog post he is driven to lament that '...as usual, Microsoft has jumped its own shark and is out stomping through the weeds planning and talking about far-flung future strategies in interactive television and original programming partnerships with big dying media companies when their core product, their home town is on fire, their soldiers, their developers, are tired and deserting, and their supply-lines are broken.' Nat goes on to detail a list of Microsoft's past and present strategic Xbox blunders, while tossing some barbs towards Nintendo's and Sony's game console strategies."
It's the interface. It sucks. I bought a machine to game on, not one to sell me other crap. Two years ago when they changed to pre metro I boxed up the x-box and games and gave it to my nephews.
X-Box is doomed. Simply because it's not about gaming, but all about sales.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
He'll try to convince them to can this stupid idea of linking all game purchases with a single xbox live account, and getting rid of the stupid "always-on" DRM requirement.
... wait, what?
Didn't think i would ever say this...but have to admit Bill gates leaving MS was NOT the best thing to happen to MS. Srsly though ballmer is just pushing the MS car down the cliff.
You must be new here. We have a Microsoft bitch-fest everyday even if they don't make anything newsworthy. It's either a Windows 8 post, or some rumour about DRM on the xbox, or Stallman saying something dumb, or something about UEFI, and if all those fail then we find some random guy that quit a decade ago and writes a butthurt blog post.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
I disagree. I think most of their arcade games are "shitty" as it is. Plus why should I pay $15 for a title on my xbox when I can get the same game cheaper on four other platforms for less? PLUS, it doesn't cost me $5 a month to take full advantage of my iPad.
A more open and competitively priced market is exactly the thing that would bring me back, but Windows 8 had proven that they have other plans.
Oh look, it's another retired general bitching about how much better things were when he led the army. File this one under W for 'Wozniak'.
The number 1 issue I have with MS and Xbox is that even after paying around $60 a year for their service I still get bombarded with advertisements covering upwards of HALF my f*cking screen!!! Where the hell is the money going if it's not going towards paying to have a clean, ad-free service?
The ones about UEFI annoy me the most. Too many people, even on slashdot of all places, think UEFI is just a graphical addon to BIOS that also adds DRM. It's nothing of the sort, most existing UEFI systems on OEM computers have a text based configuration tool and don't even secure boot. (Windows 8 mandates the change of the later of course.) Further, BIOS also had DRM capability.
UEFI is a complete replacement of BIOS. BIOS had a ton of restrictions related to all sorts of things, e.g. partition count and size on the bootable hard disk, BIOS requires POST (which in modern systems needlessly adds to the boot time) as well as a ton of reserved and now useless for decades interrupts. These new things that you find with UEFI (e.g. graphical configuration tool) are simply new features that UEFI allows for, but aren't required.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
If there is a more obvious piece of astroturf anywhere I'd love to see it. But the bit about loving what you can do with the Xbox you don't actually own is almost as classic as mentioning Smart Glass and capitalizing it.
Few things make you seem as ignorant as when you insist on typing "X-Box" instead of "Xbox". I'm the biggest fucking grammar Nazi on the planet, but "Xbox" is a fixed string as it's a trademark. It doesn't matter if it "should" be "X-Box" or "X-box" or whatever -- it's *a fact* that it's "Xbox".
Because of DirectX, duh.
yeah, the more they overdo the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain..
seriously, the bootloader on modern hardware doesn't need all that bullshit.. it just needs to load a binary image and execute it. If a more advanced bootloader is needed, just use the bios loader to chainload in place of the OS kernel. The rest of UEFI is fluff. Your other complaints about outdated POST are easily remedied without making the whole stack suck.
I have never found myself comfortable with any gaming consoles. My fingers have never been able to get the hang of the consoles. I think the future, the human race will be divided into 4 groups of evolved species with differing hand configurations - the consolers, the keyboarders, the swipers and the rest of the world. Let the games begin!
Ok, these are the ACTUAL complaints in the article:
1) Microsoft has purposefully locked out small developers from contributing to XBox.
2) Cluttered interface that bombards the user with unnecessary and confusing pop-ups.
3) Apple may be able to get control of the console business if they open up their Apple Store ecosystem to Apple TV
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the pinnacle of console gaming, on any platform - and it was particularly good on the Xbox.
"seriously, the bootloader on modern hardware doesn't need all that bullshit..."
Just what is "all that bullshit"? People that make these comments have no idea.
"The rest of UEFI is fluff. "
Point out some of this "fluff" specifically.
It's the XBox360 that sucks, frankly.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No. I run the Plex media server on my Mac and it streams videos to my Xbox and my Roku just fine. And, I run Microsoft Smartglass on my iPhone to control my Xbox.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Yes, it does need "all that bullshit." Booting from anything except an on-board hard disk controller on a PC BIOS is a hackjob. It's just an absolutely horrible clusterfuck. The fact that it ever works at all is a testament to the hard work put in over the past 20+ years by all the bootable expansion card makers.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but your comment really makes me think that you've never used anything except a desktop PC. In the server world, you always boot from an expansion card -- note that onboard NICs count as expansion cards in this context, because the BIOS can't boot from them directly; it has to pass control to the NIC's BIOS, which handles PXE -- at least once in the server's life to kickstart it. And there are a good number of situations where you never boot from a local hard disk. That's not just PXE. It also includes iSCSI and FC HBAs, ROMs or flash devices, RAID controllers, and probably a raft of things that I've simply never encountered.
I think that OpenBoot would've been a better choice than UEFI, personally. But I don't think any knowledgeable person can dispute the need for something better than the 1980s-era PC BIOS.
i never claimed to have run the army. at best i was a grunt-turned-sergeant-awkwardly-promoted-to-captain who had the ears of the generals because i knew what we could build, who could build it, and i could describe it to everybody - i was boots on the ground. i'm just pointing out that i think the current strategy is wrong and will likely fail, not that i was running it better back in the day.
n@
Are you that pompous ass at every party who feels the need to brag to everyone "I don't even OWN a TV"?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
gee I wish I could play this with my friend
That's why the Xbox 360 console has multiple USB ports for connecting wired controllers and a built-in receiver for pairing multiple wireless controllers. PCs can technically do that too, but it's not traditionally done. The selection of games that support multiplayer on one machine is consoles' big advantage over PCs.
Anyone know why he named it XBOX?
Because when you put your thumbs on a PlayStation controller, the right thumb covers buttons marked with an X and a square (that is, a box). Even 360 refers to a circle, which is also a PlayStation button.
Or it could just be that first person shooters with no depth are easy to churn out. Look at them closely, and there is barely any deviation from the Doom archetype really. You will probably find it very hard to get money for something that is not easy to churn out, so you have to blame the simpletons in charge of the money for underestimating the intelligence and tastes of the 'proles'.
By the way, well done for sounding like a snob on at least 15 different levels :) . Video games don't force people onto the couch, they just give them something to do while they are there, a bit like television, the wireless, the written word, and spoken stories did before them! Apathy forces people on to the couch, because we live in a society where everything has already been done and yet insists on going round and round in circles for no reason while pretending not to notice that it is fucking up everything around it! I think you will actually find that people don't like playing football because...well its fucking boring, that's why. If it wasn't, no one would protest! You see awesome examples of street sport from all over the world on youtube, yet for some reason people have to reduce sporting activity to a scientific process of penis measurement, the logical conclusion of which is the Olympic games, which could quite honestly be used in a hospital for anaesthetic! 50 years ago, most people walked to school, then your generation fucked everything up by deciding that driving and roads was a cornerstone of modern society! I don't see any fat fucks in countries where people can't drive everywhere they go!
I piss on your lawn, and kick over your garden gnomes while I am at it!