January 3, 2008
The service availability problems that afflicted Xbox Live at the end of last year have been well documented, and although Major Nelson did a sterling job with a constant flow of Twitter updates and blog posts, nothing has been said about the cause…
I figured it was a bandwidth/performance scaling problem caused by an exceptionally high demand over the Christmas holiday period, until this, seemingly unrelated story, with the headline “XBL accounts pwn3d, Microsoft does nothing”, caught my eye…
..and that got me wondering if perhaps they’d implemented a number of internal fixes to address the issue and inadvertently screwed something else up in the process - after all, most of the problems with XBL appeared to be account-related; logging on, account creation, account recovery, etc.
I’m speculating here, of course, but one thing is certain - if there was a security hole in Xbox Live that allowed accounts to be hijacked, Microsoft will have done something about it, even if they don’t (or can’t) admit it.
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January 3, 2008
In case you didn’t know, this year’s CES will be Bill Gate’s last and the rumor is that one of his announcements - alongside stuff about Surface and Sideshow - will be a new Xbox with an internal HD-DVD drive.
If this is true, I’m afraid that new “feature” on its own isn’t going to cause much excitement.
I use my Xbox 360 as a media centre - streaming video, photos and music to it - just as much as I use it as a games console, and there are times when the noise of the console itself drowns out quieter pieces of movie dialogue. I had been thinking about getting at least one other Xbox 360, say, for the bedroom , but the thought of it howling away in the corner while Mrs T is trying to sleep means that idea won’t get off the ground.
No - what Bill needs to show us is an Xbox 360 that runs near-silent, like the PS3.
For that one feature alone, I would replace my existing Xbox 360 and buy another for the bedroom the moment it was released.
So, please Bill, get on stage, fire up that new Xbox and say “Listen to this….”
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December 18, 2007
One of the things I was most looking forward to from the Xbox Fall Dashboard update was the opening up of movie downloads from Video Marketplace to the UK market (among others).
Here’s how it works; you download a movie of your choice for cost somewhere between £2 (for a standard def movie) and £3.20 (for a high def movie). After downloading, you have 14 days in which to watch your movie before it expires gets deleted; as soon as you start to play the movie, you have 24 hours to finish watching it before it expires.
The initial movie offerings are a bit hit-and-miss (thanks to Engadget for the list), but on Friday evening I opted for The Fugitive, in standard def. The movie was listed as 1.8gb download, so I was a little surprised to see the download confirmation message appear after only a couple of minutes.
Knowing that the movie expires 24 hours after you hit play, I didn’t do anything with it until Saturday evening, when Mrs T and I curled up on the sofa for a little Oscar-winning action. I hit play and got the following screen:
This confirmed my suspicion that there was no way a 1.8gb file could been sucked down that quickly. I hit Play anyway, thinking that if the Xbox knows it’s only got a partial download and I’ve just hit play, it would go out and download the rest of the movie in the background. Not so; about 40 minutes into the film, we got kicked back out to the video blade.
The section of the movie we were able to watch was pretty good - there was a bit of pixelation at the start, but after that it was fullscreen DVD quality with 5.1 surround - and that was streamed to the Xbox over my wireless LAN, too.
I went back into Video Marketplace and tried to download the movie again, but then got this screen:
Well, I thought, at least I’m not going to be charged twice! I tried again several times during the evening with no joy, and didn’t have any more success on Sunday either. I ended up taking a quick look on Xbox.com to find that there were indeed some technical issues with Video Marketplace. The problem for me was that my 24 hour countdown was now running:
Strangely, when I tried to play the section I’d already downloaded, I was unable to - and this was well within the 24 hour window:
So, today I called Microsoft and after spending only a couple of minutes in a queue, got through to an operator. I explained what had happened and read back the error codes I’d seen, and within 5 minutes had the 250 points refunded back to my account (after going through the now-obligatory security questions).
Despite the problem I had, the service deserves at least a second chance, so I will be using Video Marketplace again. Perhaps a way for Microsoft to improve the customer experience is to not deduct the points until the movie has fully downloaded, so that if glitches with the download do happen, the customer isn’t the one having to chase for a refund.
As far as the UK is concerned, this a new service offering so there are bound to be a few hiccoughs early on, but if you’ve used Video Marketplace too, I’d be interested to hear what your experiences have been like.
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October 5, 2007
It seems last week’s speculation was true because Bungie have today confirmed that they will be breaking away from Microsoft to become an independent company.
Any group capable of producing a product that generates $300 million worth of sales in it’s first week is, surely, the thing you want to hold to the most?
Perhaps that’s the problem; maybe Microsoft was holding on a little too tightly:
… Bungie is like a shark. We have to keep moving to survive. We have to continually test ourselves, or we might as well be dolphins. Or manatees,” said Jason Jones, Bungie founder and partner.
It’s easy to see what’s in it for Bungie - “unleashed” from Microsoft, they will be free to develop titles for Sony and Nintendo - but it’s harder to see what Microsoft might get out of this.
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September 30, 2007
One of the things I found most frustrating about Facebook was the inability to update my Facebook status via Twitter.
It’s obviously something that has bugged the guys at Facebook too, because they’ve recently tweaked their API to allow the Facebook Twitter app to post Tweets to your Facebook status! (You’ll need to be a Facebook member for that link to work, btw.)
Thanks to Blognation, via Twitter!
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September 25, 2007
If you’ve unlocked your iPhone, because you wanted to choose which airtime provider to use, or because you live outside the US, then be warned; Apple will be disabling your handset with their future software updates.
Not only will Apple’s future updates turn a working handset into a brick, users who suffer this because they chose to unlock their iPhone, won’t be covered by Apple’s warranty, either.
Read the full statement here.
[Update:] the iPhone Dev team, who released the only usable unlock software, have released a statement of their own.
Technorati Tags: iPhone, unlocked, software, firmware, update, brick
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