Odyssey

After the Xbox Live snafus two weeks ago, Micro-Soft has done it again! This time “less than 1%” of the Xbox 360 owners (roughly 6 million at last count) had problems getting the latest firmware update released a couple days ago. Apparently, the engineers forgot to incorporate cross-checks for the unlikely possibility that someone might have avoided applying all the previously released updates to their system before downloading this latest update. These people are now left with an expensive paperweight, and Microsoft deserves some credit here as it is trying as hard as possible to provide them with new consoles. A newer update to the update has also been released. 

I am glad I am safe!

In other news, a strain of California electronic voting machines was found to have a “featured” flaw that enables multi-voting by the same person. The developers claim that this is an expected feature as the button responsible for the flaw is supposed to be never pressed during actual operating. Yeah right! All this after the infamous Diebold fiasco. I am sure global voting machine developers could learn something from India, where there have been no Electronic Voting Machine exploits to date.

I am starting to get critical of people who diss software development outsourcing to India as buggy.

UPDATE: Looks like xbox.com is down once again for “scheduled maintenance”. Uh oh!