Re: [SLUG] Xbox

From: Derek Glidden (dglidden@illusionary.com)
Date: Fri Jan 25 2002 - 14:06:00 EST


On Thu, 2002-01-24 at 18:38, Paul M Foster wrote:

> BTW, anyone know how Xboxes are really selling? I've heard a lot of hype
> from gamers who really wanted them, but no hard data.

The only hard data I've heard is that they are having abnormally large
percentages of failed units, customer service to get them replaced
sucks, they tend to crash a lot, have few games gamers are actually
interested in, (and had to buy a game company - Bungie - just to get the
few games that people ARE interested in) and even though the Xbox is
brand new and the PS2 is a year old, the PS2 still way outsold Xbox for
the christmas holiday this past season both in terms of consoles and
games. (I can't find the article in which I read that last factoid, but
the PS2 outsold the Xbox in the many hundreds of thousands of units,
IIRC, and the Xbox only just outsold the Gamecube.)

Just walking around the stores this past holiday season I heard any
number of people saying things like "Yeah, I'll wait for that to come
out on PS2. I don't want an Xbox." or "Buy the PS2, it's got better
games than the Xbox." NOBODY was impressed with the Xbox, plus Sony was
marketing the HELL out of PS2 in all the stores I was in.

I'm not impressed with the numbers or the reports "from the field." I
think the only thing that could conceivably "save" the Xbox for
Microsoft is that they've discontinued _both_ their WebTV and UltimateTV
divisions and moved the engineers over to the Xbox division.

Clearly, and as predicted, Microsoft is planning to take the Xbox beyond
just a gaming console and want to make it a full-fledged "set-top media
box" type of thing with gaming, 'net connectivity and "TiVo"-like
capabilities all wrapped into one unit. (Buy an Xbox. Then buy games
to play games, buy the "WebTV" DVD-ROM to use it as an MSN (of course)
client, buy the "UltimateTV" DVD-ROM to record your TV shows, etc...)

Except that I don't quite see how to successfully combine all those
technologies - you CAN'T make it a "TiVo-alike" *and* a gaming console.
You CAN'T have your 12-yr-old rebooting it while it's recording the new
"Friends" just because he wants to play "Kickboxer 12". You CAN'T
reboot to load the MSN client so you can check your email while it's
recording "Farscape".

You *could* use it to play games now, then reboot to your 'net client
later, but the Dreamcast has done that for years now and it's WAY
cheaper and works with ANY ISP. (In fact, hasn't the PS2 had a web
browser too?) But more importantly, nobody cared if it could do that.
People don't seem to want a game console that can browse the Web.

Nobody cares if your games console can read email, and it just doesn't
work to combine something that needs to be on all the time (TiVo) with
something that traditionally gets rebooted a dozen times during a play
session (console). You'd have to buy multiple units - one for each
functionality. Which I don't think people will want to do and totally
defeats the purpose of having one piece of hardware being/doing all
things in the first place.

Frankly, I think Microsoft put their foot in it yet again by trying to
come up with something that will "do everything" and winding up with
something that sort of does everything, but none of it particularly well
enough nor compelling enough to have people use it.

-- 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map
{$_%16or$t^=$c^=($m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;
$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)
[$_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h=5;$_=unxb24,join
"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$d=
unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=$t&($d
>>12^$d>>4^$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*
8^$q<<6))<<9,$_=$t[$_]^(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}
print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval 

usage: qrpff 153 2 8 105 225 < /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILENAME \ | extract_mpeg2 | mpeg2dec -

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/ http://www.eff.org/ http://www.anti-dmca.org/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:42:53 EDT