12/12/2003: 
Criminally Absurd
MSFT apparently devising new crapware disc format for Xbox
from Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing
MSFT has a traditional business-model for the Xbox: sell people devices that are deliberately crippled, then charge them money to temporarily uncripple them. Unfortunately, MSFT's customers keep on treating their bought-and-paid for Xboxes as though they were their property, "hacking" the devices so that any software can be installed and run on them.
To combat this dreadful piracy, MSFT is apparently considering moving from traditional CD-sized silver discs for its Xbox built-in readers to some other, nonstandard format that it will have exclusive control over, via patents or trade secrets or both. This is a wonderfully terrible idea: spending extra engineering dollars to produce a device that does less, costs more, and can't be used to run all the media and code that's available on traditional optical discs. Nice one, MSFT.
According to the ad, Microsoft's Xbox team is seeking an engineer "to manage the design and development of the Xbox Game Disc for the next generation Xbox console", with the job description going on to mention anti-piracy as the first in a list of key factors for the new game disc specification. Although it's possible that the role will simply involve devising a copy protection mechanism for games on existing DVD media, similar to that used by the current generation Xbox and the PlayStation 2, the description of the role hints strongly at the company developing a more proprietary format.
