Archive for the 'Microsoft' Category

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Xbox Live Vision Camera coming on Sep 19

Published on Wednesday, May 31, 2006 in Gaming, Internet, Microsoft and Technology. 3 Comments

xbox live vision cam

According to Microsoft’s Major Nelson, the Xbox Live Vision Camera demoed at E3 ’06 that had its pictures leaked onto the internet, will be simultaneously released in the US and Europe on September 19. This isn’t like the 360 release where they were weeks apart, for the first time it is being released on the same date! However, he did not mention any price for the camera, which you will be able to use for video conferencing and video emails, in some games (ie UNO) as well as for customising your profile picture.

UPDATE: “Major Nelson has corrected an earlier report made during a recent Blogcast concerning the release date for the Xbox Live Vision camera: it will be out in Europe and Asia (outside of Japan) on October 2nd rather than the earlier September 19th date, which still applies for 360 owners in the U.S.” [link]
UPDATE 2: “Our friendly anonymous source at Microsoft has provided us with a few more details concerning the 360 accessories announced back at E3. Perhaps the most important involves the bundling of the Xbox Live Vision camera with a wired headset, the popular Live Arcade title UNO, and a month of Live Gold service for $39.99 when it releases in the States on September 19, 2006.” [link]

Microsoft Announces Xbox 360 Update

Published on Monday, May 29, 2006 in Gaming, Internet, Microsoft, Noteworthy and Technology. Closed

This is really good news! This will be the first major update the 360 since its launch in November. The update will be rolled out “in about a week” and will include many goodies such as background downloading (finally), Xbox Live Marketplace enhancements and more. There is a short overview below, but follow the link for the full article at Joystiq with many photos.

New Media and Entertainment Menu on the 360 Marketplace focuses content into groups, as well as having a link for iPod AAC support. It does have groups like Televison and Short Films, but no content has been added. Is Microsoft going to partner up with a TV network?
There is also a Games menu and Demo’s and Game Videos. The Games screen now has a ‘Newly Released’ section so that new additions to the Xbox Live Arcade can be quickly located and downloaded.
The new download manager offers background downloading so that you can play a game while waiting a file to download (hooray!) It contains a download queue of files to be downloaded in order after the previous has completed. There are siz download slots available, but downloading will pause of you play a game online.
Fast Forward/Rewind button in videos downloaded from the XBLM ranging from 2x to 16x speeds.
Music Player & DVD Playback Improvements – Music playing stays the same when you move from one function of the 360 to the next. With DVD playback you can add bookmarks to films so that you can play a game if you get an invite from a friend and resume playback when you put the disc back in.
“Full” USB keyboard support – It’s a bit ambiguous, as I plugged in my Mac’s USB keyboard a couple of times before to enter some stuff.
Startup feature, instead of automatically booting into whatever game is loaded in the drive, you’ll be able to set your console to boot into the Dashboard by default. I have been waiting so long for this feature!

The update should be available within the next two weeks, so login to Xbox Live regularly (if you don’t already) to see whether it has been put up. The full list of features will be on Xbox.com during the week.

Nightmare Packaging Story

Published on Monday, May 29, 2006 in Microsoft, Noteworthy, Technology and Wireless. Closed

This is one story that will make your feet rumble, seriously it isn’t for the faint hearted!

The stubborn plastic casing around the Microsoft Xbox 360 faceplate seemed to laugh first at the kitchen scissors and then the steak knife that tried to penetrate it. When 14-year-old Daniel Mroue’s attempt to open the thing with a long, serrated bagel knife failed, his parents became concerned.

Mroue’s father, George, took over with a pair of box-cutters, which did the trick. But George Mroue also ended up with a wad of bandages shoring up the damage after slicing his palm open on a sharpened piece of plastic.

“It was ridiculous,” groused George Mroue of the February incident. “There was nothing anywhere telling us how to open the (darn) thing. I don’t understand why they make it so goddamn hard to open these things.”

That’s an increasingly common question these days. From Psyclone electronics cables encased in impenetrable layers of thick plastic to DigiPower camera batteries coated with packaging several times the size of the item itself, the hardest part of buying electronics these days is opening the products when you get them home. In many cases, it makes solving Halo 2 seem like a kindergarten project.

This article from Wired explains a whole lot with fiddly packaging. I too have had such problems. For example, on Christmas day when I opened up my 360, Santa kindly left me a wireless USB adapter for the 360. It was so hard to open that I cut my hand with my pen knife (I was too lazy and excited to get a proper scissor) and sliced the manual of the adapter. You can see the manual in the image at the top. Some of today’s packaging so so fiddly and hard to open that they do pose a risk to people. Especially on Christmas when people are hyped up and excited. I may actually refuse to buy such things in the future unless it is really necessary because I know that I will spend half my time trying to open the damn thing!

E3: The Xbox Live Vision Camera, Racing Wheel and Wireless Headset

Published on Wednesday, May 10, 2006 in Gaming, Microsoft, Noteworthy, Technology and Wireless. Closed

During Microsoft’s E3 press event, they showed off the Xbox Live Camera (called the Vision Camera), the Racing Wheel and the wireless headset. Engadget checked them out and took lots of photos, however they couldn’t get their hands on them because of the obvious sign “Do Not Touch’. But did that stop them, no! They tried the headset, and they thought it felt quite comfortable, if not a little fragile. The Racing Wheel is pretty cool and wireless, but to use the vibration feature you have to connect it to a wall socket. For more photos read on. The Xbox Live Vision camera will be available this autumn (fall for you Americans) and will allow users to use their 360 for video-conferencing, video-emails and gamer picture customisation, and is the same thing we’ve been seeing in those leaked images.
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E3: Engadget and Joystiq’s Coverage of the Xbox 360 Event

Published on Wednesday, May 10, 2006 in Gaming, Microsoft, Noteworthy, PC, Shorts and Technology. Closed

E3: Microsoft confirms USB HD-DVD for Xbox 360

Published on Monday, May 8, 2006 in Gaming, Microsoft, Noteworthy, Technology and TV's. Closed

Microsoft has confirmed at E3 today the addon HD-DVD player for the Xbox 360. It is going to be an optional add-on that runs via the USB 2 port on the 360. Interestingly, Microsoft didn’t slag off Blu-ray saying it wasn’t as good as HD-DVD, nor did they praise HD-DVD (much) either. Microsoft calls the quality of the two formats “a wash in terms of video quality,” and they say that the main diffrerence between the two will be the price. This probably means that the HD-DVD drive will be a bargain, to convince people to buy it. Adding that to the price of the 360 and it’s features it seems a pretty good deal generally and for those who don’t want to for out the $1k for the current HD-DVD players. But how will it rival against the PS3, which will have Blu-ray built in for only $399, but that will only be out in November (unless it gets delayed ike Vista).

Xbox Live service down on May 2

Published on Monday, May 1, 2006 in Gaming, Internet, Microsoft, Noteworthy, Software and Technology. Closed

xbox live logo Xbox Live will be down for 2 to 24 hours tomorrow (May 2). Microsoft didn’t exactly broadcast this, so I’m sure there will be some pretty annoyed people. However Xbox 360 Fanboy reader Clayj called Xbox Live customer support the other day and received an automated announcement that said that Xbox Live service will be down on May 2 for maintenance updates, including another Dashboard update. Apparently the voice message isn’t on the line anymore (I called the UK Xbox Support and nothing was mentioned at all), but if you hold and talk to a support staff they can confirm it. Though they can’t tell you much about what the update will involve, and nor can Xbox website.

A tour of Microsoft’s Mac Lab

Published on Thursday, April 20, 2006 in Apple, Microsoft, Noteworthy, Software and Technology. Closed

microsoft mac lab

This is really cool (I over use that phrase here!) David Weiss works at Microsoft’s Mac Area, and gets to handle lots of Mac equipment. He shows us lots of Macs, they even had vintage macs such as the Mac SE, Mac Classic, Quadra 650 and others. Sadly they had to put those into storage as space ran out. The picture opposite shows their mixed automation rack, in testing. They had the same sort in only G3′s, G4′s and G5′s. The most spectacular part was where he showed of the 150 Mac mini’s that run tests on Microsoft’s software.
This collection is spectacular, and includes an X-serve in RAID config (with 1TB of space) and XSAN which provides all the Mac OS images from 8.1 to 10.4.6! This is then used to restore images onto the test machines to run thousands of tests to see how well Microsoft’s software works. This is a definitely good read, and you can just stare at those machines for hours (literally!)

Working at Microsoft: The Good, the Bad and the ‘In-Between’

Published on Wednesday, April 19, 2006 in Microsoft, Noteworthy, Shorts, Software and Technology. Closed

As a long-time Apple and UNIX user/programmer, I never aspired to work at Microsoft. Then my wife got a job at Microsoft, so I needed to leave Caltech/JPL to work in Seattle. I didn’t actually apply to Microsoft — a friend of ours who worked there circulated my résumé and Microsoft responded rapidly and set up a last-minute interview. Although I had five other offers, Microsoft made the best impression.

I’ve been working at Microsoft since October, 1999 as a full-time Software Design Engineer. Four products I’ve worked on have shipped, two more are in beta, and I’ve also “consulted” for many other teams across the company, thereby influencing directly and indirectly a large number of Microsoft’s products. Between my experience and my wife’s, I think I’ve gotten a pretty solid feel for what it’s like to work in a product group at Microsoft.

Apple sued for patent infringement!

Published on Tuesday, April 18, 2006 in Apple, Microsoft, Noteworthy, Software and Technology. Closed

Burst.com filed a patent counterclaim lawsuit on Monday accusing Apple of infringing four of its patents inside the iTunes Music Store, iTunes itself, iPod and Quicktime streaming products. Burst filed this counterclaim as Apple had asked the courts earlier this year to rule Burst’s patents invalid, and so Apple wouldn’t be infringing them. Burst said that its technology is critical to Apple’s success “providing it with critical audio and video-on-demand” media solutions.

“We have a responsibility to protect our patents and to seek a fair return for the many years and tremendous investment that we have made in developing Burst technology and patents. While we had hoped to avoid litigation and negotiate a reasonable license fee, it is Apple’s own actions that have forced our hand,” said Lang. “We now look to the courts to reaffirm Burst’s rights as innovators and to be paid fairly for our widely acknowledged contributions to the industry.“

Interestingly, Microsoft also fought a battle with Burst, however they ended up paying $60 to Burst for a licence of the patent. I don’t think that this is an option that Apple is likely to take, as they don’t usually give up easily without a fight!