XBox 360 - How Microsoft wins
I was amazed when I heard the Xbox 360 would support iPods out of the box. But, of course, it has to. Embrace AND extend.
One of the big take-aways for me was hard drives vs. optical. Everyone knows what a pain it is to burn discs. They're the floppy drive / sneaker net of this era, only being used if there are no other alternatives. So of course Microsoft bypasses them with a portable hard drive.
But basically, click through to Mitch's overview of how the XBox is going to kick the PS3's butt.
Here's how Microsoft will win the Game Wars by next summer, before the Playstation 3 ships in volume, using a wireless handheld Xbox that plays games, movies and TV stored on the detachable hard drives announced in the Xbox 360—and, building on .NET, Microsoft will turn both the game console and the portable game system into full-fledged productivity systems.
RatcliffeBlog -- Mitch's Open Notebook: A bone-jarring Ah-ha moment: How Microsoft wins the Game Wars
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Great application for the X-Box
I just setup a Pluto Home system (smarthome + media
server, plutohome.com, free open source). It’s really cool. It has a
streaming movie server, music server, pvr. Plus it does home automation
and controls a/v equipment too. There’s only 1 problem…
You
designate 1 PC to be the server; they call it the core. It exposes a
network boot image for any other PC in the house, so your PC becomes
dual purpose—normal pc, or net boot and it’s a set top box. You control
it with Bluetooth mobile phones or web pads. And all the set top boxes
in the house work together. Your media even follows you as you move
from room to room if you keep the phone on. The problem is I don’t have
enough media pc’s for all the rooms in my house, and buying a full PC
for each room is too expensive. Plus there’s no video cards for the PC
that have component video output—which is the only way I can get HDTV
into my tv.
The X-Box seems perfect as a media director. It’s a
PC inside, right? So why couldn’t it boot like normal as an Xbox, or
net boot as a pluto media director? Then it would be part of a whole
house solution that did everything. I could even use the Xbox to turn
on my sprinklers if I wanted, and do all sorts of stuff with it. Plus,
since Pluto gives it a network boot image, space is no longer an
issue—all the software could be stored on the main server. And the XBox
has component video and it’s quiet and cheap.
Does anybody have
an idea if it would be possible to use the XBox as a media director
like that, doing a network boot? Then I could just buy a few of the
XBox’s rather than having to buy regular PC’s.