Lots of interesting tid-bits I haven’t had much time to write about:
The BBS Documentary is finally out. Tons of chatter on aliases in MSFT among those of us who used to BBS. I got my start in the industry as Operations Manager for Excalibur Communications Inc., creators of the first GUI-based BBS, Excal BBS for Windows (via Way Back Machine).
Speaking of way back and given the recent escalation in “we’re better” mantra’s in the console wars, check out the hype way back for a certain game console. I’m still looking for my real-time rendering of Toy Story. 🙂 Xbox 360 guru Major Nelson has his take here, while Sony has theirs here.
Through the din, dust, and ashes of the latest salvo in the console wars, you might have heard about Xbox 360 supporting display of photos, music, TV, and even high definition content and services from Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 PCs. Personally I was waiting to see who was going to be the first to announce RSS and Podcast support for their console ;). I’ve been tracking this since long before we launched MCE05 and I can say I was super-skeptical they could get the polish of the MCE experience on “Xenon” as Xbox360 was known. I was dead wrong. Consumers will now have two premium choices if they’re connecting to an HDTV: a full-fledged Media Center PC, or an Xbox 360 with Extender built-in (BTW: this functionality was codenamed “XeSled”- a play on Xenon and the codename for the first-generation extender, “Bobsled”. I’m looking forward to putting mine through it’s paces but security keeps stopping me from liberating one of these bad-boys from Xbox offices over at Millennium campus- go figure.
Speaking of High Definition and Xbox, the team posted a whopping 17 WMV-HD gameplay trailers here. Download em all.
Lastly, I had a good chat with Ian Dixon over in the UK this AM via Skype. My wife and I used Skype to make calls home from the UK and Greece just a few weeks ago and it worked great. I was surprised at how low the latency was. It wasn’t without issue (couldn’t find peer nodes from time to time to help connect) but that was a small price to pay for free calls!
More tonight…