Again I haven’t been big into console gaming, but here’s a bit more XBox 360 news that I’ve run across. First up, is the Free60 project, whose aim is to port linux and darwin to the new XBOX 360 hardware platform. It’ll be interesting to see if this can be done without hardware modification…
The story I had the other day talked about the problems quite a few of hte new XBOX 360 owners were running into with frequent crashes.
Oooops… According to the Sunbelt blog a Japanese storage maker (I-O Data Device) has offered to exchange drives that were discovered to have been shipped out with the Tompai-A, a worm which would give a cracker backdoor access to a machine. It affects portable hard drive’s in the companies HDP-U series.
I’ve not been big into console games. The last computer we had that directly connected to the TV all the time was an old Atari 400. (Which I occassionaly wax nostalgic for…) Anyway, the XBox 360 is the recently released big new upgrade to the XBox from Microsoft and there are a couple of interesting reports out about it today. For one, Business Week is reporting on the likely loss that Microsoft is taking on each unit (they seel for $399), they’ve looked and think that MS is losing a bit over $100 on each one. The goal of course, is to make money off the games. There is worse news though for some XBox 360 new owners.
One of the nice things about working on computers is that when it comes to the raw hardware of a system, the engineers have designed a way to communicate what’s wrong (even if it’s just a general idea) even when the hardware has a pretty serious problem. When a computer boots it goes through a POST *(Power On Self Test). This POST process basically is the BIOS (Software embedded in the hardware of the system that exists whether or not an Operating System like Windows is installed) “waking up and testing the hardware.”
The Nokia 770 linux based Internet Tablet will have it’s US debut on November 17th. The details on hardware specs on the device are available at linuxdevices.com, and there’s a news forum available at internettablettalk. I highlighted the tablet a few weeks back, but there was no specific date for U.S. release. The device will use a debian based Linux distro called Maemo and will sport around 3 hours battery life with continuous wi-fi usage. The price is ~$359.
I was reading that Apple had offered free copies of OSX for the $100 laptop project aimed at bringing cheap laptops to schoolkids in the developing world and in some cases even here in the US. They don’t have the price down to $100 yet, but OSX was rejected because it isn’t open source, apparently the designers want an Open Source OS to work with so they can tweak and tinker with it.
I’ve said it before and mentioned DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) as my favorite tool for this, but Sunbeltblog is mentioning this and it’s worth reminding you. When you replace a PC, you might keep the hard drive around for a short period to make sure you have all your data, but PLEASE plan on finding some way to delete or wipe or nuke or destroy ALL the data on the drive.
This is, in fact something I’ve been getting ready to do an article on soon. I had a system that had very strange and random problems that I’ve visited and tried many of the typical fixes for, in fact I think I saw it a couple times a week and either couldn’t reproduce the errors on demand, or could only get an error once, do something and not see it again, then hear about something similar the next day…
Anyway, ultimately the system has been replaced (and it’s twin…) on inspecting the motherboard post-pull, there were some interesting issues with the capacitors, yellowish crusty leaked electrolyte… uh-huh, that explains everything…
About a week ago, when I was in the midst of several crises, I had a Dell Inspiron 5150 left with me to look at. I had seen it once before to replace the keyboard (I remembered that it had a nice design to allow easy access to swap a keyboard – something that is usually hit or miss with laptop design.) Anyway, this time it was blue screening before it would let you log in to Windows XP. I booted it up and saw the Welcome screen and before my mouse pointer made it to the username I saw the bluescreen.