Idiotic features #2 - voice control
The XBox 360 Kinect hardware now lets you control your XBox by talking to it. That's all well and good, and apparently it works reasonably well, but the vast majority of owners (including me) use our XBoxes almost exclusively to play games.
No matter how hard you try, no amount of talking to your XBox is going to get it to grab a game disc and insert it into the disc tray. Now, if tomorrow we all wake up in fantasy land, where the big media companies have finally realized that copy protection and DRM are utterly pointless, we could all merrily install our games onto nice big hard drives connected to our XBoxes. At that point, voice control starts to become useful. Of course, you still need to find the controller to play a game...
On the other hand, people who have hacked their XBoxes, allowing them to run games directly off the hard drive - without requiring the disc - may find this very useful.
So, is Kinect voice control the best reason yet to hack your Xbox 360?
No matter how hard you try, no amount of talking to your XBox is going to get it to grab a game disc and insert it into the disc tray. Now, if tomorrow we all wake up in fantasy land, where the big media companies have finally realized that copy protection and DRM are utterly pointless, we could all merrily install our games onto nice big hard drives connected to our XBoxes. At that point, voice control starts to become useful. Of course, you still need to find the controller to play a game...
On the other hand, people who have hacked their XBoxes, allowing them to run games directly off the hard drive - without requiring the disc - may find this very useful.
So, is Kinect voice control the best reason yet to hack your Xbox 360?