web-ology.com

Today, Microsoft made CNN Money with news that the next Xbox *might* play both Xbox and PC games. Considering 90% of the Xbox’s hardware is technically an Intel based machine with very few differences between it and a standard PC. Microsoft made numerous claims that the “Xbox is not a PC” claims up until now, so it was interesting to me that they would change their stance so late in the game. What’s even more intriguing to me is that CNN Money would release a story about this subject as if this were actual news.

For anyone that has never looked behind the scenes at the Xbox, it runs Windows CE with standard DirectX 7/8 as it’s graphics API, it’s an Intel P3 7xx MHz processor, with standard RAM, and a either 20 GB or 40 GB hard drive in it. While the Xbox can help stabilize problems that arise that game makers face by trying to support multi-hardware vendors for video cards, etc. It’s technically an x86 PC behind the hood.

My favorite quote from the article was the following:

“There will come a day – in the not too distant future – that [PC] games will be interchangeable between Windows and the Xbox,”

… This feature has existed on the Xbox since day 1, but Microsoft has put pressure on several game companies to release the first release on the Xbox and/or to make the titles Xbox exclusive. Case in point, Halo was released on the Xbox over a year before it made its PC debut.

I stumbled on PearPC, which could be a gem for all of my Mac and Mac-wanna-be friends. PearPC is a power-pc emulator for x86 platforms. This program allows you to run OS-X inside of Windows or *nix operating sytems. While I’m no Mac fan, it could be very useful to some.

I worked on some additions to that back end of my news feed aggregator tonight. From a front end perspective, it now displays a daily summary of which feeds have been updated, the total number of updates, and links to the last feed posted. I have quite a few features planned as well as a few when I get time to work on them.

As of late I’ve been spending quite a bit of my free time working with c# / .net. So far I have had good luck getting a rapid start on a few projects. I’ve worked with C, VB, Java, and dabbled with C++ and so far, c# has been the most productive language that I’ve worked with. I spent a few hours working with .net’s networking libraries and I developed both a fully working client / server and a peer-to-peer application.

While I like working with c# in for application development, .net has not proved to me to be capable to keep up with php for web applications. For now, php for web, c# for windows development.

A recent post of mine about the MaxiVista multi-monitor system showed up in google and ranked high enough that it was noticed by MaxiVista. My post was picked in their testimony section. Although without my permission, it’s still nice to get a semi-popular site to link back to my site to build up my pagerank.