Positively ecstatic feedback continues to come in for the new Xbox360 Wireless Racing Wheel. We are due to receive ours soon, and will post our findings. For now, check out some of the coverage:
Gizmodo: Fans of driving games traditionally either had to put up with filmsy wheels that made racing less convenient than using the standard analog stick controllers. With the Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel from Microsoft, lousy first party racing accessories are a thing of the past.
In all honesty, this was the best racing experience we’ve ever had.
and a solid endorsement from Techie Musings with a few complaints I hope get addressed in the next version:
The wheel feels very solid and “real” - when you hold it, you feel like you can throw it around and it has a satisfying length of travel (270 degrees)…. all in all, if you’re into driving games, this is highly recommended.
Technorati Tags: Xbox360, Racing Wheel
November 27th, 2006
As part of the Amazon Customer Vote deal ( cool concept by the way ), customers picked the $100 Xbox360. What should have been a nice PR move for Amazon and a good deal for 1000 customers, turned into a classic slashdot / digg effect ( crunchgear blog for details ). By that I mean an overload of traffic all trying to access the same site at the same time. Not only was the Xbox360 product page not available, but the whole Amazon.com site appeared to be down for several minutes costing the site untold revenue.
While not a remarkable event in itself — walmart.com and other sites have been down this holiday season — it is extra troubling to see Amazon go down as they are now touting their S3 platform for all kinds of services with a focus on reliability and uptime:
Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent(TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.
Scalable: Amazon S3 can scale in terms of storage, request rate, and users to support an unlimited number of web-scale applications. It uses scale as an advantage: Adding nodes to the system increases, not decreases, its availability, speed, throughput, capacity, and robustness.
Failure tolerant: The system considers the failure of components to be a normal mode of operation, and continues operation with no or minimal interruption.
We’ll check back next week to see if this happens again with the next specially discounted Amazon offer. Right now the “Axion Portable DVD Player” is leading the vote :)
Technorati Tags: Xbox360, amazon, deals
November 25th, 2006