I can absolutely confirm I've experienced the same run around. I received a replacement console after the red rings of death. I immediately called support regarding my content that no longer worked (without being logged in), went through a bunch of steps to confirm I couldn't get it to work (which was ridiculous - they MUST know that it wasn't going to work) and was then told I would be called back within a few days. They never called, so I called them back. The same routine happened for about a month, with me calling back once a week. I had to start berating the support personnel and their powerless "supervisors" as they all continued to respond "be assured we are working on this and will have it resolved as soon as possible". No - you are NOT working on it - please stop the lies. I finally talked to one support person that said "oh yeah, I don't know what those other guys were thinking, they logged your case completely wrong, I'll get this taken care of immediately, you shouldnt have had to wait this long. I schedule a call back with you on Monday to confirm". He went so far as to set up a specific 3 hour time period when I would receive the call back. Which of course never happened. After going through these weekly calls of yelling at their useless "support" for a few months, I wrote to Major Nelson pleading my case (I don't know him personally, it was a desperation attempt). He sent my case number to someone in "escalations" who actually DID call me back. I thought I was finally getting somewhere. Within a week I got a call from someone in engineering confirming my console ID and serial number. Things looked promising. That was 2 months ago. My content has STILL not been unlocked. And no, nobody was willing to give me points to re-buy the content. If they used to do that, they sure don't anymore.
I WAS a fanboy. The 360 and XBox Live were a great product. However, this is the absolute WORST customer experience I have ever had with any company, hands down. Because of their complete incompetence and unwillingness to resolve my issue, they have destroyed their image, and made me want to tell everyone I know about how bad their support is. Please spread the word.
Wait - you mean if I enjoyed a movie with a gay theme, people are going to assume I'm gay?
Anyone think the IMDB rating of Brokeback Mountain is going to plummet dramatically. (It is 7.8 today)
And of course, if it does, we will be able to correlate the timing of the sudden drop with the publishing of this slashdot article, allowing us to link the slashdot readership with imdb users. Now we have your Netflix ratings, IMDB ratings, AND slashdot postings all correlated...
As others have mentioned (but I will repeat, because depressingly few people know about it), you just need the free Transcode 360 app to watch any format not supported by the Xbox natively. http://runtime360.com/blog/ TVersity is supposed to do the same thing, but I haven't used it.
Try those out and see if you still need the AppleTV (did you keep your receipt?)
I agree that if you can redefine the meaning of FPS, you will be able to lump more games into the category. I also think the Gears' use of the third person perspective allowed it to introduce integral new gameplay mechanics that are not possible in an FPS. So I think lumping it in as "just another FPS" would be disingenuous.
Majority of games are FPS? Other than Call of Duty 2/3, what popular game is an FPS?
The games I've most enjoyed on my Xbox 360: Geometry Wars, Gears of War, Crackdown, Viva Pinata, Texas Hold 'em, and Guitar Hero 2. Neither of which is an FPS. In fact, I think thats a pretty varied list of game genres. I'll agree that the library of good games doesn't go much deeper than the ones I listed, but thats a different criticism.
And HD-DVD add-on never used for games? Why is that a criticism? "This game would be SO much more fun if the disc was spinning in THAT drive instead of THIS drive". It might be a valid argument if games were running into limitations on the current drive, which other platforms were taking advantage of.
I'll agree, the 360 deserves a list of drawbacks (too loud?) - just not this list.
I don't agree with the assessment that GH2 for 360 was "half finished". It is a great game, out of the box.
HOWEVER, I specifically held off from buying the PS2 version, so that I could wait for the 360, because of the promise of downloadable songs. I figured they would release all of the original GH1 songs for about $40 or less (based on the fact that you can buy it for PS2 for $40). And then there would be the option to get new songs. That made it worth the wait.
But now I feel I made the wrong decision. I should have just bought GH1 and GH2 w/guitar for PS2 months ago.
Consider this: GH1 + GH2w/guitar + PS2 system (refurb at ebgames) = $210 (available now) GH2w/guitar for 360 + all songs from GH1 (assuming they are released at same rate) = $188. (all songs available in months after they trickle out)
Seems to me, option 1 is a much better deal, even if you have to buy the PS2 system. I'm sorry, but for this type of game, having the graphics in HD is really not worth that much.
I disagree. I believe in multiple layers of security. If one layer fails, there are still mechanisms in place to keep an attacker out. How does a user have "access to everything else" if they have access to your configuration files? What if the security on your configuration file was misconfigured? Or the mechanism that protects your configuration file has a flaw in it? What if it is stored in a publicly accessible directory, and "everything else" is not? If the information is encrypted, the attacker may be a step closer (by having the encrypted date), but they still have a lot of work to do (to get at the real data). If it is clear text, they're in.
Correct, Live Arcade is the download service for complete games. I said there was no limit on "downloadable content" -- the term used by the parent post. Personally, I download and play game demos more than I play XBLA games. That is the best feature of the XBox360 - the ability to get hands on experience with new release games without having to buy it or rent it. I agree that the limit for both will be increased as soon as it becomes prohibitive.
XBox Live was designed and tested to work with wireless. I use a wireless connection ($40 WAP turned into a bridge using DD-WRT) and have never had any latency issues. I play online multiplayer with voice chat, download large demos, and regularly watch streaming movies from my PC.
There is no limit to the size of downloadable content on XBox Live - at least none that I have seen. I've downloaded some game demos that were well over 1GB.
The 50MB limit that is mentioned only applies to Live Arcade - the section with retro and "party" games.
I'm not sure how that compares to Sony's 500MB limit - does Sony's limit apply to ALL downloadable content?
The last sentence is the key (to the Zune's loss of potential).
If songs received wireless cannot be shared, then it cannot be viral. That is a huge limitation that will bite them.
If it really were viral, it would have some tremendous potential to change the music scene. A small, unknown band that has a rabid fanbase could start sharing their songs. If people like it, they would share it with their friends, etc. A previously unknown band could suddenly be a hit (assuming the music was good enough to spread) and be on everyone's music list. Requiring people at each level to buy the song before they can share it will severely suppress the spreading of new and interesting music.
Wait, are you linking to a Slashdot conspiracy theory (the text you linked to says "knowing Microsoft, it will PROBABLY..." as your supporting evidence for being poorly conceived?
But they DID do something about it when they found out, and confirmed the potential impact: they issued the largest electronics recall in US history.
Now, considering Dell only purchased a small portion of the faulty run of Sony batteries, you might consider the lack of action from all of the other notebook manufacturers an interesting story.
WMP does not require admin priveleges. You are probably just trying to read media files, or have your entire library stored, in a folder that the non-admin user does not have access to. Put the files in the My Documents (or Shared Documents) tree, or grant permissions to the folder you are already using.
Thought you probably would have found that via Aaron Morgosis' Blog.
I have my wife setup as non-admin, and she doesn't really notice. I run as non-admin at home and its fine. Sometimes it gets messy during development when you need to attach a debugger to a system process (IIS), but there are ways to resolve each issue, and they are documented at the above sites.
What are you basing that conspiracy theory on? Where did you get pricing information?
Consider that the game will be released for both XBOX and PlayStation. Are you suggesting that the shrinkwrap copy of the XBOX version will have features missing that the Sony version has? Or are you suggesting that Sony will only get half of the game (ever), and only XBOX users can get the complete game (by buying the episodic content)? Both scenarios sound farfetched to me. I think it is more likely that both the XBox and Sony shrinkwrap version will be complete games - with nothing "cut out" for the purpose of nickle and diming you later. However, after the game is complete and shipped, additional content will be developed, and only available on the XBox. The game as shipped, on both platforms, will stand on its own. Xbox owners will have the additional OPTION to get more content at a later date.
I don't know any more than you do, but I strongly believe that is a much more likely scenario. If they ship a partial game on either platform, there will be a major (deserved) backlash. Is that really what you are suggesting they will do?
You are a minority consumer. Most consumers enjoy and accept expansion packs, aftermarket mods, sequels etc. When they invest their time in a game, they like that they can continue the relationship with more content in the future. You, the consumer that wants a distinct beginning and end, with nothing beyond what is in the shrinkwrap box, are a minority. (Based on my completely unscientific estimation, of course)
I installed one of the first IE7 beta releases. I was surprised that the new search box includes a drop down that lets you change to AOL, Yahoo, Google, or Ask Jeeves (but defaults to MSN). I selected Google once, it worked as expected, but the next time I launched IE, it was set back to MSN Search. Without digging much further, I figured that was just how it had to be... Microsoft was giving space to the others, but still asserting its control.
Then when I browsed to the Google homepage, I got a little DHTML pop-up window that said something to the effect of "hey, you're using IE7, wanna change the default for your searchbox to use Google?" Perfect, I had wanted to do that, and I guess they figured out how. So I press OK. I restarted IE7, and sure enough, my default search was now Google. Thanks Google.
Except, a funny thing happened when I let Google change my settings. That list of alternate search engines that Microsoft had provided, for the user's benefit, was now replaced by a single choice: Google. Yes, I wanted Google as my default, but I never said I wanted Google as the only choice! That's annoying.
That is when I noticed the Search Settings... menu option at the bottom of the search bar's menu. It includes a Restore Defaults... button, which does exactly that. I clicked it, and all of my search engines were back (and MSN Search was back to being the default). From that Search Settings screen, I selected Google, and clicked Set Default. Now Google was my default search engine, AND I still had the choice of selecting a different engine from the drop down. That is what I wanted. Why didn't Google give me what I wanted?
You just listed out EXACTLY why someone would want to use a tool like Atlas.
We don't complain about writing GUI applications because its too much work to manipulate every different pixel on the user's screen. We have tools and a technology stack that abstract all of that for us so that we can work with widgets.
That is what Atlas is all about. It gives you the desired functionality of AJAX, without the pain normally required when dealing with the low level details (XML, extensive Javascript, etc).
You don't pay attention to Dell. Dell does not try to create new products and convice people to buy them (like R&D driven companies do). It figures out what people want, and then sells it.
Anyone that spent $300-400 already got exactly what they wanted: the right to say they own the current hot item. The list of available games was not a secret - if the games available were not worth it, then you wouldn't buy the system yet (assuming you do any research before dropping $300 on something).
From what I hear, the classics and mini games ARE the best part of XBOX 360. So I think its great they are making more. To some people, a system that integrates nicely into their home entertainment system and plays classics/mini games IS worth the money.
I would disagree. I personally can't stand the "random, jumpy" style used by MTV in any form either. But I don't think this book is guilty of that. They use a flashy style to draw attention to particular concepts. It is used to FOCUS.
That is very different from what I consider MTV-editing, which is used to abstract, or pile a bunch of images/concepts into a single "idea", or feeling. There is no focus.
Slashdot Mirror
I can absolutely confirm I've experienced the same run around.
I received a replacement console after the red rings of death. I immediately called support regarding my content that no longer worked (without being logged in), went through a bunch of steps to confirm I couldn't get it to work (which was ridiculous - they MUST know that it wasn't going to work) and was then told I would be called back within a few days.
They never called, so I called them back. The same routine happened for about a month, with me calling back once a week. I had to start berating the support personnel and their powerless "supervisors" as they all continued to respond "be assured we are working on this and will have it resolved as soon as possible". No - you are NOT working on it - please stop the lies.
I finally talked to one support person that said "oh yeah, I don't know what those other guys were thinking, they logged your case completely wrong, I'll get this taken care of immediately, you shouldnt have had to wait this long. I schedule a call back with you on Monday to confirm". He went so far as to set up a specific 3 hour time period when I would receive the call back. Which of course never happened.
After going through these weekly calls of yelling at their useless "support" for a few months, I wrote to Major Nelson pleading my case (I don't know him personally, it was a desperation attempt). He sent my case number to someone in "escalations" who actually DID call me back. I thought I was finally getting somewhere. Within a week I got a call from someone in engineering confirming my console ID and serial number. Things looked promising.
That was 2 months ago.
My content has STILL not been unlocked.
And no, nobody was willing to give me points to re-buy the content. If they used to do that, they sure don't anymore.
I WAS a fanboy. The 360 and XBox Live were a great product. However, this is the absolute WORST customer experience I have ever had with any company, hands down. Because of their complete incompetence and unwillingness to resolve my issue, they have destroyed their image, and made me want to tell everyone I know about how bad their support is. Please spread the word.
Wait - you mean if I enjoyed a movie with a gay theme, people are going to assume I'm gay?
Anyone think the IMDB rating of Brokeback Mountain is going to plummet dramatically. (It is 7.8 today)
And of course, if it does, we will be able to correlate the timing of the sudden drop with the publishing of this slashdot article, allowing us to link the slashdot readership with imdb users. Now we have your Netflix ratings, IMDB ratings, AND slashdot postings all correlated...
As others have mentioned (but I will repeat, because depressingly few people know about it), you just need the free Transcode 360 app to watch any format not supported by the Xbox natively.
http://runtime360.com/blog/
TVersity is supposed to do the same thing, but I haven't used it.
Try those out and see if you still need the AppleTV (did you keep your receipt?)
I agree that if you can redefine the meaning of FPS, you will be able to lump more games into the category.
I also think the Gears' use of the third person perspective allowed it to introduce integral new gameplay mechanics that are not possible in an FPS. So I think lumping it in as "just another FPS" would be disingenuous.
Majority of games are FPS? Other than Call of Duty 2/3, what popular game is an FPS?
The games I've most enjoyed on my Xbox 360: Geometry Wars, Gears of War, Crackdown, Viva Pinata, Texas Hold 'em, and Guitar Hero 2. Neither of which is an FPS. In fact, I think thats a pretty varied list of game genres. I'll agree that the library of good games doesn't go much deeper than the ones I listed, but thats a different criticism.
And HD-DVD add-on never used for games? Why is that a criticism? "This game would be SO much more fun if the disc was spinning in THAT drive instead of THIS drive". It might be a valid argument if games were running into limitations on the current drive, which other platforms were taking advantage of.
I'll agree, the 360 deserves a list of drawbacks (too loud?) - just not this list.
I don't agree with the assessment that GH2 for 360 was "half finished". It is a great game, out of the box.
HOWEVER, I specifically held off from buying the PS2 version, so that I could wait for the 360, because of the promise of downloadable songs. I figured they would release all of the original GH1 songs for about $40 or less (based on the fact that you can buy it for PS2 for $40). And then there would be the option to get new songs. That made it worth the wait.
But now I feel I made the wrong decision. I should have just bought GH1 and GH2 w/guitar for PS2 months ago.
Consider this: GH1 + GH2w/guitar + PS2 system (refurb at ebgames) = $210 (available now)
GH2w/guitar for 360 + all songs from GH1 (assuming they are released at same rate) = $188. (all songs available in months after they trickle out)
Seems to me, option 1 is a much better deal, even if you have to buy the PS2 system. I'm sorry, but for this type of game, having the graphics in HD is really not worth that much.
I disagree. I believe in multiple layers of security. If one layer fails, there are still mechanisms in place to keep an attacker out. How does a user have "access to everything else" if they have access to your configuration files? What if the security on your configuration file was misconfigured? Or the mechanism that protects your configuration file has a flaw in it? What if it is stored in a publicly accessible directory, and "everything else" is not? If the information is encrypted, the attacker may be a step closer (by having the encrypted date), but they still have a lot of work to do (to get at the real data). If it is clear text, they're in.
Correct, Live Arcade is the download service for complete games. I said there was no limit on "downloadable content" -- the term used by the parent post. Personally, I download and play game demos more than I play XBLA games. That is the best feature of the XBox360 - the ability to get hands on experience with new release games without having to buy it or rent it.
I agree that the limit for both will be increased as soon as it becomes prohibitive.
XBox Live was designed and tested to work with wireless.
I use a wireless connection ($40 WAP turned into a bridge using DD-WRT) and have never had any latency issues. I play online multiplayer with voice chat, download large demos, and regularly watch streaming movies from my PC.
There is no limit to the size of downloadable content on XBox Live - at least none that I have seen. I've downloaded some game demos that were well over 1GB.
The 50MB limit that is mentioned only applies to Live Arcade - the section with retro and "party" games.
I'm not sure how that compares to Sony's 500MB limit - does Sony's limit apply to ALL downloadable content?
The last sentence is the key (to the Zune's loss of potential).
If songs received wireless cannot be shared, then it cannot be viral. That is a huge limitation that will bite them.
If it really were viral, it would have some tremendous potential to change the music scene. A small, unknown band that has a rabid fanbase could start sharing their songs. If people like it, they would share it with their friends, etc. A previously unknown band could suddenly be a hit (assuming the music was good enough to spread) and be on everyone's music list.
Requiring people at each level to buy the song before they can share it will severely suppress the spreading of new and interesting music.
Wait, are you linking to a Slashdot conspiracy theory (the text you linked to says "knowing Microsoft, it will PROBABLY..." as your supporting evidence for being poorly conceived?
But they DID do something about it when they found out, and confirmed the potential impact: they issued the largest electronics recall in US history.
Now, considering Dell only purchased a small portion of the faulty run of Sony batteries, you might consider the lack of action from all of the other notebook manufacturers an interesting story.
WMP does not require admin priveleges. You are probably just trying to read media files, or have your entire library stored, in a folder that the non-admin user does not have access to. Put the files in the My Documents (or Shared Documents) tree, or grant permissions to the folder you are already using.
http://nonadmin.editme.com/
Thought you probably would have found that via Aaron Morgosis' Blog.
I have my wife setup as non-admin, and she doesn't really notice. I run as non-admin at home and its fine. Sometimes it gets messy during development when you need to attach a debugger to a system process (IIS), but there are ways to resolve each issue, and they are documented at the above sites.
Search Slashdot for ATLAS (and make sure to copy over all of the negative posts about why people don't want this).
.NET GUI objects to render browser-compliant javascript and HTML.
Atlas is the AJAX framework built by Microsoft that allows you to use
It is a much more proper predecessor to Google's release, compared with Yahoo!'s offering (which I believe MS also predated).
What are you basing that conspiracy theory on? Where did you get pricing information?
Consider that the game will be released for both XBOX and PlayStation. Are you suggesting that the shrinkwrap copy of the XBOX version will have features missing that the Sony version has? Or are you suggesting that Sony will only get half of the game (ever), and only XBOX users can get the complete game (by buying the episodic content)? Both scenarios sound farfetched to me.
I think it is more likely that both the XBox and Sony shrinkwrap version will be complete games - with nothing "cut out" for the purpose of nickle and diming you later. However, after the game is complete and shipped, additional content will be developed, and only available on the XBox. The game as shipped, on both platforms, will stand on its own. Xbox owners will have the additional OPTION to get more content at a later date.
I don't know any more than you do, but I strongly believe that is a much more likely scenario.
If they ship a partial game on either platform, there will be a major (deserved) backlash. Is that really what you are suggesting they will do?
You are a minority consumer. Most consumers enjoy and accept expansion packs, aftermarket mods, sequels etc. When they invest their time in a game, they like that they can continue the relationship with more content in the future.
You, the consumer that wants a distinct beginning and end, with nothing beyond what is in the shrinkwrap box, are a minority. (Based on my completely unscientific estimation, of course)
I installed one of the first IE7 beta releases. I was surprised that the new search box includes a drop down that lets you change to AOL, Yahoo, Google, or Ask Jeeves (but defaults to MSN). I selected Google once, it worked as expected, but the next time I launched IE, it was set back to MSN Search. Without digging much further, I figured that was just how it had to be... Microsoft was giving space to the others, but still asserting its control.
Then when I browsed to the Google homepage, I got a little DHTML pop-up window that said something to the effect of "hey, you're using IE7, wanna change the default for your searchbox to use Google?" Perfect, I had wanted to do that, and I guess they figured out how. So I press OK. I restarted IE7, and sure enough, my default search was now Google. Thanks Google.
Except, a funny thing happened when I let Google change my settings. That list of alternate search engines that Microsoft had provided, for the user's benefit, was now replaced by a single choice: Google. Yes, I wanted Google as my default, but I never said I wanted Google as the only choice! That's annoying.
That is when I noticed the Search Settings... menu option at the bottom of the search bar's menu. It includes a Restore Defaults... button, which does exactly that. I clicked it, and all of my search engines were back (and MSN Search was back to being the default). From that Search Settings screen, I selected Google, and clicked Set Default. Now Google was my default search engine, AND I still had the choice of selecting a different engine from the drop down. That is what I wanted. Why didn't Google give me what I wanted?
Try the alias command.
You just listed out EXACTLY why someone would want to use a tool like Atlas.
We don't complain about writing GUI applications because its too much work to manipulate every different pixel on the user's screen. We have tools and a technology stack that abstract all of that for us so that we can work with widgets.
That is what Atlas is all about. It gives you the desired functionality of AJAX, without the pain normally required when dealing with the low level details (XML, extensive Javascript, etc).
You don't pay attention to Dell. Dell does not try to create new products and convice people to buy them (like R&D driven companies do). It figures out what people want, and then sells it.
Why doesn't Dell build a TabletPC?
Anyone that spent $300-400 already got exactly what they wanted: the right to say they own the current hot item. The list of available games was not a secret - if the games available were not worth it, then you wouldn't buy the system yet (assuming you do any research before dropping $300 on something).
From what I hear, the classics and mini games ARE the best part of XBOX 360. So I think its great they are making more. To some people, a system that integrates nicely into their home entertainment system and plays classics/mini games IS worth the money.
I would disagree. I personally can't stand the "random, jumpy" style used by MTV in any form either. But I don't think this book is guilty of that.
They use a flashy style to draw attention to particular concepts. It is used to FOCUS.
That is very different from what I consider MTV-editing, which is used to abstract, or pile a bunch of images/concepts into a single "idea", or feeling. There is no focus.
You can already get most segments of the daily show on comedycentral.com. For free./ index.jhtml (click Videos in the menu on the left)
http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_daily_show
Once I discovered that, I canceled my cable subscription.