XMP was the first time I ever picked up a soldering iron -- so I could "hack" my OG Xbox 1.0.
I will always, always love and respect it. I love that they are still committed to the OG device. I want to pull mine out and see if the spinning hard drive still works after all these years, might even try to update it!
If you do go ahead and fire up your old Xbox, it would probably be worth you running XCAT.
> Xbox Content Archive Tool (XCAT) is a utility that runs directly on an Xbox console to
assist in finding unarchived DLC and other lost content. When run, the application will
scan the Xbox hard drive for any content that has yet to be archived and upload it
directly to the servers of the XCAT Team for later analysis, sorting, and archival.
Precarious hard drive IDE cable-swap-while-running gang here. Sitting there wondering if I was going to kill something with both the family PC splayed open on the dining room table and the Xbox splayed open on the dining room table, with a Linux live CD in hand…
I still can’t believe Bert would have ever cheated on Ernie[1].
People with the skills to design these things impress the hell out of me. The ability to reverse it to then understand it well enough to create these exploits are impressive.
Also, I hate fonts. My two least favorite parts of using computers are fonts and printers. Even in the old days of System 7-9 pre-OS X, fonts would prevent a system from booting. Many a times, I had to reboot without loading extensions, move out fonts, and then reboot because some font I just "borrowed" was corrupt. Even then, I was flabbergasted that a font could crash a computer. The more things change, the more they stay the same it appears.
In the context of how that hack works, I'd argue that Bert and Ernie are working together to tag team the Xbox dashboard. Rather than cheating, seems broadly consensual to me, at least as far as Bert & Ernie are concerned.
Yep my electronics engineer dad was like "you cannot do this" but it worked! He got me to put an aligator clip wire from case to case so the grounding would at least be joined?
I remember at its peak renting 5 games at a time from blockbuster, copying them to my Xbox in the parking lot and dropping the DvDs in the return box to confused employees inside who had just rung me up.
Dont think I played many of the games the real game was building the collection haha fond memories
That's what my dad used to mod our OG Xbox. My neighbor (unmodded) and I would split the Blockbuster Gamepass (I think that's what it was called) for $30/mo (IIRC) for unlimited rentals, just 1 at a time. We'd take it home, rip it to my Xbox then put the disk in his and we'd play through whatever the game was until we finished or got bored, then rinse and repeat.
Had I been able to drive at that time I would have tried to get the family van that had pull down TV (tiny) screen in it so I could do what you did.
I always wanted to mod mine, but was worried about Xbox Live ban (even on OG xbox)
This had me wondering what the name of the chip I intended to buy was ... which had me remembering then name Bennie Huang, which led me to realize the OG Xbox he modded is on display near me at the Henry Ford museum (!): https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
I never had Xbox Live, but I wanted to preserve the option so I used an Xecuter that included an on/off switch that you used double-sided tape to attach just under the power button. Flip the switch and reboot to the stock BIOS and you were good to go with online gaming.
I think I used splinter cell. The exploit was also only in a specific version of the game. I remember having to look at a version number on the cd when buying to confirm I was getting the right one.
Yeah, given all the people with passion/ability for low-level reverse engineering have left the project, I don’t think we should ever expect to get greater than M2 support from Asahi. Maybe one day another project will pick up the ideas, but for anyone not wanting to use years old hardware, the dream of Linux almost natively existing on modern Apple silicon remains just that: a dream.
And you can get iPhone 14s for $99 on occasion as long as you commit to prepaid service from Total Wireless/Trac Fone for 3 months (so about $180 - so your total price for the phone and 3 months of service is about $300) or you can use carrier trade-in deals to get hundreds of dollars off an iPhone 17, as long as you stay on a postpaid plan and take the credit over 3 years.
Yes, there are way more options to get sub $500 Android phones, but pretending like an iPhone is too expensive for most Americans when carrier deals are often as good or better for iPhone options (to say nothing of the older phones being sold by Total Wireless and the like) and when more people in the United States use iPhone vs Android is a little bit silly.
We just got $1130 from Verizon for my husband's old iPhone 14 Plus towards his new iPhone 17 Pro (I get a new phone every year so I’m just on the Apple Upgrade plan or I buy it outright each year, whereas he gets a new phone every 3 years or so), making it essentially free (we had to change the plan he was on but it cost the same as the old plan) and if he’d wanted a regular iPhone 17, he could’ve dropped down to a cheaper phone plan too. A 16e would’ve been even less than that.
>I don’t think it makes sense to call the Steam Machine a misstep because there was no Proton. There would be no Proton nor Steam Deck without the ground work started with the Steam Machines.
I’ve written before about how I think the Steam Deck is one of the best v1 products in recent memory, in large part because Valve learned so much (and so well) from the failures of the Steam Machines.
I don’t know if I would call it a misstep, but it was absolutely a failure. And a brutal one. Valve should be lauded for taking the right lessons from that failure and investing in Proton and doing the compatibility work themselves rather than expecting devs to do it (Apple is the only company that consistently gets developers to rebuild for their platform, and even game developers won’t do that), but we shouldn’t let the fact that it wound up on the right path years later diminish the fact that the original strategy —- if not the devices or idea itself —- was hugely flawed.
I have a Steam Machine, one of the Alienware ones. You're completely correct. SteamOS as shipped on those machines sucked. The controllers sucked. The PC hardware wasn't bad and could play games alright but the experience sucked. I made it into a Linux desktop I used for years and it worked much better for that than as a dedicated games console. But the SteamDeck very plainly incorporated lessons learned from Steam Machines.
But all the update you like in your SteamDeck also came to the Steam Machines plus nice remote play on your local network. You couldn’t see because you stopped using it as an actual Steam Machine. I personally deeply disagree about the controller too.
Personally, for such an early and unlikely product, I don’t view it as a failure at all. They ironed everything they had to using the platform as a stepping stone.
For Mac users, ffWorks [1] is an amazing frontend for FFmpeg that surfaces most of the features but with a decent GUI. It’s batchable and you can setup presets too. It’s one of my favorite apps and the developer is very responsive.
Handbrake and Losslssscut are great too. But in addition to donating to FFmpeg, I pay for ffWorks because it really does offer a lot of value to me. I don’t think there is anything close to its polish on other platforms, unfortunately.
You’d have to check with Microsoft. OpenAI says that this doesn’t apply to customers with a Zero Data Retention endpoint policy, but my recollection is that Azure OpenAI doesn’t fall into that category unless it’s something that is explicitly paid for. That said, OpenAI also says that ChatGPT Enterprise customers aren’t impacted (aside from their standard policies around how long it takes to delete data, which they say is within 30 days), but only Microsoft would know if their API usage counts as “enterprise” or not.
I can say with a high level of confidence that the goal is definitely not to push larger orgs to ADO over GitHub. ADO is and will continue to be supported and you’re right that its project management features are much more advanced than GitHub, but the mission is not to push people off of ADO and into GitHub.
Your opening and closing statements aren’t mutually exclusive, but I can’t tell if one is a typo (or if so, which one it is).
I didn’t mean to imply that MS wanted to migrate anyone, just that the different offerings serve different kinds of customers, so you can’t really just compare GitLab to GitHub and say MS is lacking in serving some group of them.
100% this. It would be one thing if the only LSPs you could build came from Microsoft, but that’s just not true. It’s just that developing LSPs isn’t free.
Cursor, Windsurf, etc. are building multi-billion dollar businesses off the backs of the work that the VS Code team has done. And that’s totally fine! What’s not fine, is trying to have access to the whole ecosystem of first party extensions that aren’t MIT licensed.
I agree there should be more resilient extension repos, but this is one of the problems Eclipse Theia [0] has tried to take on, but most projects just fork the core VS Code experience and slot in OpenVSX rather than doing the hard, expensive work of building their own extension marketplaces or LSPs. And you know what, for a community or OSS fork, I think that’s fair. I think when you raise hundreds of millions in funding, you can build your own LSPs and start to maintain your own infra for extensions. And if you’ve got enough buy-in, you can probably convince developers to submit directly to your marketplace too.
And it isn’t even a rug pull, per se. The first changes to the license on some of the 1P VS Code extensions probably happened in late 2018 or early 2019, with remote share. The LSPs may have changed later. If anything, the Code team was probably too lax about letting the commercial forks use their resources wholesale against the license terms for as long as they did.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft and then at GitHub with things that touched VS Code. I now work at Google, who uses VS Code (well Monaco) inside some of our editors/products, but I don’t work on any of those.
I will always, always love and respect it. I love that they are still committed to the OG device. I want to pull mine out and see if the spinning hard drive still works after all these years, might even try to update it!