It doesn't matter that only Office and Windows are making money. Do you realize the margins they're pulling? Microsoft AS A WHOLE is still making money. And a lot of it.

Microsoft has already said they're planning on <b>losing up to two BILLION dollars on Xbox</b>. They're going to spend $500 MILLION on advertising alone. And this is USD, my friend. That's a <b>LOT</b> of money.

I think you underestimate the power of the dollar. You know that lame old saying, "Money talks and bullshit walks"? Well, it's true.

Xbox isn't going anywhere. Microsoft has the money and the muscle to make sure it succeeds.

The whole reason for Xbox has little to do with game console or set-top boxes of any kind.

Xbox is a stalking horse for Palladium. If MSFT can develop the technical and legal mechanisms to keep the PC-archetecture Xbox locked down, they will apply it directly to the next Windows hardware reference platform . You know, the "trusted" one.

So MSFT will simply throw money at this project until it accomplishes what they want: millions of free manhours of attempted penetration testing by devoted hardware hackers.

Ywa but the point is msft has lots of divisons where they've written off and plan to write off billions, you can only do that for so long when your market share isn't really growing. Money sure does talk, but stuff can still suck. Money can buy a lot of things but it can't get rid of suck, Microsoft stills seems to be hemmoraging suck.

XBox is good, but that that wonderful, they can spend a few hundred mil on advertising but it still won't be a great product and Sony aren't exactly a small company either.

I think Maggie you might be on the right track but i don't think it's that narrow, the real test will be with Xbox 2, that will give us a much better picture of the direction of the xbox. I do see your point though. On the other hand i don't think Palladium will ever achieve what it was meant to do. I don't think consumers will swallow it either. It's liek they've been reading too much IBM business theoy from 20 years ago "if we lock everyone down so noone else can do anything, we'll control everything and have a complete monopoly!!!".

History is on the side of openness

But MicroSloth is NOT and therein lies the problem.

And Microsoft is succeeding. They got the DOJ to take http://www.isonews.com away from its owner by threatening him with 5 years of anal sodomy...err, make that 5 years in a federal penitentiary for selling XBox mod chips.

They replaced it with a website reminding us that the Federal Government is there waiting to stomp on YOU, yes YOU at Microsoft's behest. (OK, it doesn't say that in so many words)

(The real isonews site is still up at http://66.201.243.170 )

In what way is one of these things not like the other?

(You put up links to two identical websites ... one might say that they link to the same page ...)

not on my end. the first one is a DOJ webpage and the other is the orangey lookin isonews site.

~james

And, of course, the new page and the media keep framing the case as "mod chips == illegal software piracy."

I myself have a modified PlayStation (via chip), for the primary purpose of playing imported games that never received a US release. (Tobal 2, the Mother of All PS1 Fighting Games, was the motivator.) Ditto for my Sega Saturn. If there was a reliable PS2 mod that didn't involve major soldering, I'd have chipped that by now as well. Why? Imports, baby.

tried again, this time with MicroSloth Internet Exploiter.

I don't get ANY DOJ websites coming up, just the isonews.com site ...

This is so damn weird ...

Your DNS server hasn't received the updated listing yet. Give it a little while longer, and it'll change over.

A parody
 

The "D0J 0WN35 ISONEWS" site has already been parodied by http://www.vcdquality.com

A pair of interesting takes today on topics previously discussed:

<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/29522.html">Microsoft, Electronic Arts looking to buy Sega?</a>

<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/29498.html">Conflicting analyst reports over Nintendo's future</a>