My source inside the Xbox team posted a response on my Seattle PI reader blog to some of the questions asked in comments.

"First, why the secrecy?
MS knows who I am. That's why I'm not concerned about self identifying to them in these postings with details only they would know, as some here have pointed out. The people who founded Xbox hw number 10. 1 left to go be the VP of manufacturing at Qualcomm, 1 left to go be the GM of engineering at Zune, 1 left after only 2 months in '99 due to conflicts with toddhol [Todd Holmdahl]. He works on Surface now. The rest still work on Xbox. I am the only one who left the company entirely.
I am not concerned about MS knowing who I am. They are worried about me revealing their problems. Not the other way around. Plus, I have contacted every single attorney who has filed a lawsuit against MS and offered to help. Some have accepted, and that work is in progress. We'll talk about that in another post. It's very interesting, I just don't want a bunch of fan boys trying to hack my home PC (that I use for work). Harass my kids, call my house, etc.

Second, why now?
Well, it's not just now. I've been reaching out since before the product went into manufacturing. I left before launch. But many employees continued to contact me about the problems with the product and its launch. I did my best to help them figure out how to mitigate the problems caused my bad management decisions, and test the boxes right. Sometimes my ideas worked, sometimes they didn't. I then started to contact reporters. Sometimes it went no where. Sometimes, it resulted in a spectacular thing, like the ambush interview with toddhol just before MS admitted guilt. But still, it happened too slowly for me. That's one reason I'm doing this now.

Last: My motivation.
I have always been in a position to stand up for the customer. MS stopped me from doing that. They need to pay the price now. If you guys won't get together and make that happen, you have no hope for the future with them. It's not my fight, but I am here fighting. You decide what you want to do. And then do it!

http://www.8bitjoystick.com/archives...e_responds.php ...

via Computer and Video Games


A new advert for the PS3's PlayStation Network has appeared online and it seems to be taking a slight dig at Microsoft's subscription-based Xbox Live model.

"The fun's always free" is the tagline for the ad, pointing out that it costs PlayStation 3 owners precisely bugger all to download content and play online, where as paying Xbox Live Gold subscribers cough up £40 for the same privileges.

Of course you could also argue (and we will) that Xbox Live Marketplace is a superior service to the PlayStation Store (what's with the month-late PS3 demos?) and integrated friend lists also give XBL the edge. But is it really worth the full cost of a game?

If anything, it's great to see that Sony's finally pushing one of the PS3's greatest selling points. If the public starts taking notice of the PS3's online service it can only mean good things for us, and hopefully less wallet pain on the Xbox 360 end too.

Let's just hope Sony doesn't turn round some time this year and start charging for PSN. That would make them look a little silly...


Ad image here ...

Microsoft has unveiled the latest update on how its next-generation console is faring in Australia. According to Microsoft, 306,000 Xbox 360s have now been sold in Australia, with more than two million games also sold since the console's launch in March, 2006.

It seems that as many as 160,000 Xbox 360s were sold in Australia in 2007 (and up to 80,000 in the final quarter of the year alone). By comparison, Sony's PlayStation 3 has sold 155,000 units down under since its release in March, 2007.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6184926...s&subj=6184926 ...

With a full year's worth of data, we can now see how the three big consoles fared during all of 2007. The weekly console sales rates for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii are shown below.

December 2007 was the best month of hardware sales ever for the Xbox 360, up 11.5% from the record it set in December 2006. For the entire year of 2007, sales of the Xbox 360 were up 17.7% from 2006. At the beginning of 2007, the installed base for the Xbox 360 stood at 4.5 million systems on 14 months of sales. By the end of 2007, just 12 months later, the installed base had more than doubled to 9.15 million systems.

The keys to Microsoft's success were the August price drops and the launch of Halo 3 in late September. Together they effectively started Microsoft's holiday sales surge a month early, pushing monthly Xbox 360 sales up over Wii sales briefly.

The biggest win for the Xbox 360 in 2007 is quite possibly what did not happen: consumers did not shun the system after Microsoft acknowledged higher than acceptable hardware failure rates. The billion dollars that Microsoft set aside to cover the extended warranty program is costly, for sure, but as PR it has worked brilliantly. While many consumers know about the "red ring of death" failures, they bought more of the systems than ever before after Microsoft's mea culpa.

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?op...=8750&Itemid=2 ...

via Eurogamer


Sony has declared PlayStation 3 had a bumper Christmas in Europe, with more consoles sold over a five-week period than ever before.

The company reckons 1.2 million PS3s were shifted in total. According to big king chief man Kaz Hirai, that figure is in line with high US sales during December.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Hirai said Sony would continue to ramp up support for its shiny black box. "We want to promote games only available for PlayStation 3," he said. "The introduction of the 40 gigabyte model is in line with that strategy."

According to analysts, Sony is unlikely to meet its target of 11 million PS3 units shipped by the end of March. A figure of 8 million is more likely, apparently. But Kaz sounds very relaxed about everything.

"We haven't made any conclusion whether we have to give it up," he stated. "It depends on how aggressively dealers buy our PS3 inventory." ...

via Games Industry


Games for Sony's PlayStation 3 have surged into the Spanish software sales chart top ten, finally ending a lengthy run at the top for various Nintendo platform games, according to sales data from Media Control GfK International for the week ending January 13.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 for Sony's next-gen console topped the chart, with Uncharted: Drake's Fortune coming in third and Assassin's Creed taking seventh - the most titles that the PS3 has had in the top ten for many months.

Titles for the DS and Wii were still well represented, with More Brain Training in second, Super Mario Galaxy in fifth, the original Brain Training in sixth and other titles in the last three positions.

Meanwhile in Germany Nintendo continued to dominate the software sales top ten, with More Brain Training leading the way, followed by Wii Play in second.

PC titles Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, World of Warcraft and its expansion The Burning Crusade took third, fourth and seventh places respectively, while Sony could only muster one game for its consoles - SingStar: Apres Ski in eighth place.


The full charts are as follows:

Spain

1. Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 (PS3)
2. More Brain Training with Dr Kawashima (DS)
3. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3)
4. Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 (PS2)
5. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)
6. Dr Kawashima's Brain Training (DS)
7. Assassin's Creed (PS3)
8. New Super Mario Bros (DS)
9. Big Brain Academy (Wii)
10. Practice English (DS)

Germany

1. More Brain Training with Dr Kawashima (DS)
2. Wii Play (Wii)
3. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (PC)
4. World of Warcraft (PC)
5. Mario Party DS (DS)
6. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)
7. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (PC)
8. SingStar: Apres Ski (PS2)
9. Mario & Sonic at the Olympics (Wii)
10. Eye Training (DS) ...

A while back I posted that I was looking for an RROD Xbox360; I actually sent it off to MEFAS to get digested for solder joint inspection on the GPU through a process called "dye and pry". In this process, the motherboard is flooded with red ink, and then the GPU is mechanically pried off the board. The red ink flows into any of the tiny cracks in the solder balls, and at least in theory, when you pry the GPU off the cracked regions will shear first so you will be left with visible red spots at the points of failure.

I was a bit puzzled by these results because you didn't see any "catastrophic" failure -- pools of red ink over a connection interface -- just partial cracking. Partial cracking isn't terribly uncommon, and many products work quite well despite such artifacts. However, after reading the [SeattlePI RRoD] article, if Microsoft shorted safety margins around many of the design parameters to get the product out on time, it makes sense that the summation of many partial failures could lead to a total system failure -- failures that have symptoms that vaguely cluster together but are difficult to point to any single root cause. Heisenbugs. Yuck

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=223 ...

A fresh port by me (MK2k), this time: Jump 'n Bump 1.51a for the PSP.

Game Info
This is a game for the whole family. You are cute fluffy little bunnies
and hop on the other bunnies' heads.

At the beginning you are in the menu, where you have to jump
over the tree trunk if you want to play and walk right.
Then you'll enter the arena. The aim is to jump on the
other bunnies' heads...

PSP Controls
Use the following Buttons on the PSP to have a 2-Player match:

Analog/D-Pad Left : P1 Left
Analog/D-Pad Right: P1 Right
Analog/D-Pad Up : P1 Jump

Square : P2 Left
Circle : P2 Right
Triangle : P2 Jump

Select: End the game and display statistics

The following Key Combinations enable special Cheat Modes:

START + D-Pad Up : Pogostick (continuously jumping bunnies)
START + D-Pad Right: Bunnies in Space (Bunnies can jump higher)
START + D-Pad Down : Jetpack
START + D-Pad Left : Lord of the Flies (Flies are following the Bunnies)
START + LTrigger : Blood is thicker than water

For the PSP it is not bad to enable the Pogostick mode, so only 2 Buttons are
necessary to be used by both players.

PSP Installation
This game is 1.50 Kernel.
Original 1.50 Firmware users should copy the content of the directory
FW150/MSROOT to their memorystick.
Custom Firmware users should copy the content of the directory FW3xx/MSROOT to
their memorystick.

Screen Shots




DOWNLOAD
via pdroms: http://www.pdroms.de/files/1495/ ...