The Wall Street Journal has a great article on virtual fashion in the game Second Life.  The article provides a nice insight into how the same problems that exist in real life  bleed into the virtual. 

What I find really interesting is the microeconomics of the Second Life world.  Second Life successfully uses micro payments, which has pretty much failed so far in the web "pay for content" model.  There is no supply limitation and the demand leverages to some extent the addictive quality of on-line virtual communities and the apparent low cost of the micro payments, which can creep up unexpectedly.

The article points out that Second Life has over 700,000 residents, definitely large and diverse enough to take advantage of economy of scale.  On new systems, before wide adoption occurs, the skills necessary to make any money on those systems will be minimal as the designer/programmer learns the system API and the users are incredibly hungry for anything.  With system maturity will come competition.  Second Life already has an official Nike shop for outfitting your avatar. 

Second Life also has a special teen section, though to get in you only have to provide a birthday that fits with being a teenager.   I wish Linden Labs (the makers of Second Life) would create a server system that was only hooked up through schools, which would provide a  guaranteed student/teacher population.  What an interesting economics course that would make in high school. 

BetaNews reported on Microsoft adding a handful of new games and products for the Xbox360.  While the new offerings isn't a landslide of product, I am interested in two of them, one being the wireless racing wheel and the other being the USB 2.0 gaming receiver which will let me use my Xbox controllers and headsets with my PC.  I'm always a big fan of cross-hardware compatibility and the receiver is a great step that Microsoft is taking.  Microsoft's recent opening up of the game development platform should also bolster the future of the Xbox360. 

Lately I've been playing Planeshift, a free MMORPG.  Let me rephrase that, FREE multiplayer game that while still evolving has a fairly complete world.    The client is about a 200 meg download and being in a state of constant evolution, still in the beta stage.  So if you happen to give Planeshift a try, you may run into my character "Hachee".

Looks like my XBox360 might be one of the 3% defective units that Microsoft counters as being defective in regards  to Robert Byers's claim in his XBox 360 lawsuit.  It's hanged on me three times, each during a late night 4 to 5 hour gaming session.   And if you say 3 times isn't that much, well, I've only played with it 5 times since I got it for Xmas and the previous two sessions were only 35 to 45 minutes tops.

I've got the unit vertical up on an un-enclosed entertainment console with  plenty of air flow and the power brick sitting next to it.  The brick doesn't even seem to get warm for me, but let me tell you, if the heat were a little hotter coming off the fan in the back of the XBox, you could cook popcorn. 

So what are my options, send it in, get a refurbished unit back?  Now I don't mind getting a refurbished unit later on, but to get one when I just recently purchased it and all because the problem might be an alleged design flaw (according to the lawsuit) just doesn't feel right.  There's even a website called http://www.xboxoverheating.com/

I've been around electronics long enough to know when a design doesn't have enough air flow., especially when I can remember my Apple ][ days of stuffing all 7 slots and needing two fans, one on each side and even leaving the top off to have a room fan blow on it. 

Now the Apple case is an extreme caused by overloading the system, consoles are closed systems for the most part.  Mine happens to include the hard drive option. While the slim design of the XBox is attractive, stuffing all the power of an XBox360 into it is like your girlfriend trying on her summer swimsuit the first time, it looked good in the store.

Considering that the unit has red LEDs that blink to tell you the unit is overheating pretty much means that Microsoft was aware that there might be a heat issue to begin with.

That, or the Xbox was just telling me it was time to go to bed. 

My SO just gave me an XBox 360 for my Christmas present.  Seems she just stumbled upon one of them being in stock at Meijer's.  Whooo Hoo! I had been thinking of getting one to hook up to my Media Center PC to stream video.  Now the big bummer, looks like the XBox 360 isn't compatible with my SMC7004FW Barricade Plus router.  I really don't want to switch my router since it has provided excellent service in the past and has a real nice firewall, supports virtual server mapping, DynamicDNS and some other cool features,  If anyone has successfully configured the Barricade Plus port settings to work with the XBox 360, please let me know.

I've been drooling over arcade quality in the home for some time and I've just got a little bit closer to my ideal setup with the purchase of X-Gaming's X-Arcade dual joystick.  I settled on a refurbished unit and other than a slight rubbing off of the stencil on the two player button, it's in great shape.  Ideally, I want to get a full MAME cabinet, but until then, this should suffice.  The X-Arcade can be configured with different adapters to hook up to just about any game console as well as the PC (default adapter).  On the PC, the buttons are mapped to keys and supports a standard mode and 3 programmable modes.