Poddie

I think this article should be taken down (not to mention never posted in the first place).

It seems to be attempting to perpetuate some sort of myth that XBL is unreliable.

Its facts are wrong, and the way it is written is confusing and made me think that MS was actually announcing some sort of planned outage right after Xmas. WTF?

I'm a big Xbox fan when it comes to their hardware (reliability aside), but I completely agree with this guy. The complete lack of buttons and physical interaction is very disturbing to me and I can't see how they can make many games I would want to play with Natal.

At least with the PS3 one you can have light gun games, which I enjoy a lot.

But frankly I'd be just as happy if we never got motion control... it's just like touch on cell phones. There are a few usefull applications (like scrolling on a phone, pointing in a game), but for most functions a button is FAR more efficient. But becuase it is perceived as "cool", I can't get a damn smartphone with physical buttons anymore and have to do everything with silly and non-productive gestures. On my Palm Pixi I have to "swipe" on the touchpad from right to left to go back a screen. Can someone possibly explain to me why this is better than a fucking back button? Half the time it registers, half the time it doesn't. If someone could just combine the snazzy interface and graphics with a phone with actual buttons I'd be in paradise...

Tiptup, DMCA prevents you from breaking the encryption on the disc, as well as creating a copy of the disc without this encryption.

What method of backing up the disc do you believe can be used without doing either of these things?

Yeah, I thought so... none. Nice job on your misinformation campaign.

Your post makes even less sense than your username, and that's saying something.

AFAIK, they ALWAYS ban the console, not the user. The ban the console because it has been messed with (hardware or software, they may not know and probably don't care). They assume that once it's been messed with, it will always be questionable, even if your friend did happen to mistakenly make an honest purchase of a game for once (my guess is somebody bought it for him not understanding that he typically steals his entertainment).

I have no idea why you would think they are corrupting his save files... I have never heard of them banning a hard drive. I believe you have your "facts" messed up.

Pikahunter, the software companies cannot be held responsible for your irresponsible children and idiot friend. YOU are supposed to hold them responsible... if they mess it up, they buy it. And if your children are too young to teach that then it's your responsibility to make sure they can't get at the discs.

Tiptup300, it might be that clear and simple if it weren't for DMCA. Look it up... you have much less understanding of your rights than you think.

I struggled through the limitations of Media Center and extenders for years, waiting in vain for the long promised DirecTV solution for it. When they finally shelved that (about 3 years after it was announced and constantly telling us "just wait, it's great...") I finally shelved my Media Center PC.

I think the near-ideal solution for those who want the key features of Media Center is Uverse (where available). It uses Microsoft's IPTV solution, and the interface is surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) Media Center-like. You get the benefit of centralized storage of the recordings, which was the real seller to me for MC. You get one DVR box and several "extenders" that stream content from the DVR.

There are still some limitations in comparison to MC:

- No "trick play" on extenders with live TV (being worked on for phase 3 of Total Home DVR)
- Limited amount of space on hard drive of DVR ( I had 1TB on MC, now have 160GB)
- limited options for series record (missing things like "only keep xx episodes")

That said, the pace they are working on this thing and implementing features that were previously on MC is pretty good... I expect them to have live TV trick play on extenders by the end of the year, and I've been told I will at some point be able to use the USB port on the DVR to add more storage. The UI is running quite peppy right now.

Seems ideal as a replacement for those who are tired of waiting on MS... it seems they are much more interested in moving forward with this platform.

Using it right now... along with all the other AT&T Uverse users.

I think people completely misunderstood what this was. It's an alternate method of television delivery... like cable or satellite. It's not some free TV service that streams to your Xbox. Xbox had very little to do with it. They developed an Xbox client for it so you could theoretically use an Xbox instead of an IPTV box. But the companies using the technology have little reason to use the Xbox client... it's more profitable and easier for them to rent you one of their cheap boxes per TV.

YES! I've wanted Memory Card backup for a long time... also a "copy to new memory card" function, to make moving to a fresh card easy.

I'll never understand why anyone would try to make comparisons on a much lower quality video. If you can't compare it at close to the original resolution then you're obviously not going to see minor differences in texture quality and whatnot, right?

Not to mention that while the video is in motion you are also not likely to see minor differences.

Those comparison videos just seem silly to me. If it's worth comparing them at all then it's worth comparing them in full res screenshots.

That's the really impressive thing... RE5 used MT1!!

LP2 is the first MT2 game I believe... and I LOVE CAPCOM!!!