My Xbox 360 broke on November 15th (3 red rings). I called, and after I explained that this was the fourth 360, they “escalated” me to “priority support”, said they’d send me a box to send back both the console and power supply, and that a “supervisor” from Microsoft would call me. (I begged them […]
Well, as I predicted when I wrote Microsoft Must Like Exchanging Xbox’s, my 360 has died again. This is my fourth exchange, so the new box will be my fifth Xbox 360. I’m going to try to get them to cross-ship me a new one, let’s see how that goes. … well, it didn’t go […]
It’s great to see a serious update to MFC coming. Check out this video with Pat Brenner where he describes some of the new stuff happening, with demos. I’m really torn on C++ these days. Some people believe it should basically be retired, in favour of one of the better alternatives like C# or Java, […]
Every release Microsoft promises something that’s going to make it so now you can really positively absolutely kill processes that you want to kill. With Vista, the feature that would help was I/O Cancellation, the ability to cancel an I/O request without having to wait, in case it was hung in the kernel. And yet.. […]
It’s nice that Microsoft is checking for solutions to my 584 problems: I But the “solutions” leave a lot to be desired: A newer version of Flash Player is available for download that might address this problem. A newer version of iTunes is available for download that might address this problem. A newer version of […]
Yet another fun little Vista issue. I haven’t posted one of these in a while. I’ve got a 128mb SD memory card and I wanted to transfer some stuff to it, so I plug it into the computer. The computer doesn’t recognize it for some reason – the drive letter is there, but it doesn’t show […]
Every locked piece of hardware has a community of people trying to break into it. It’s just the way of things. It looks like the Xbox 360’s time may be approaching: Just to be clear, the timing attack will allow you to downgrade to 2.0.1888. You can then upgrade to 4532 & run the KK […]
Sounds like one of the developers at Llamasoft is venting a bit about the XBox Live certification process, which we’ve heard from other developers is a pain. Here’s a view into that pain: Why this process isn’t just handled in the one interactive phase I have no idea; all I can see is that it […]
After reading about multi-processor builds in Orcas and specifically how they work (unofficially) in VS2005, I had to try it out. And it turns out that it works very well in VS2005, except when it fails completely. You can parallelize all your VS2005 builds by setting a global environment variable CL=/MP2 (or /MP4 or however many […]
Here’s an interesting rumor: A new Media Center client is in the works, but this time instead of being based on the Remote Desktop protocol, it’s based on a direct connection between Vista’s media center and a new Xbox applet, which will be downloadable from Xbox Live. This should eliminate the long delay when you […]