MIT Student Hacks Into Xbox Security System

Computer enthusiasts have been excited about the possibility of using the $199 Xbox, which is technologically similar to a PC, as a stand-alone computer running operating systems like Linux.

  

Who are the people in my neighborhood?  

Would this happen here?

I generally avoid weblogs from people under 28, mainly because they dwell on things that I found terribly difficult in my youth, and which I find boring now. But since she used to own my car, I skimmed through Croissant Living after I found it last night. I followed my usual route: reading the lastest posts, clicking on the September 2001 archive to see how they reacted to 9/11, and browsing randomly until bored. I found the mundane, the illuminating, the interesting, the embarassing, the wise, and the foolish, all in the usual proportions. To summarize: She's an American living in France -- some hilarity ensues. Yawn. Time for bed.

Upon awakening, I remembered one post she made when Bush visited France last week:

Today at market while buying some honey (from a very handsome salesman with a lovely southern accent), the group of people in line all started teasing me. Why? I simply explained that my accent was caused by the fact that I am gulp american.

"Oh your Mr. Bush is coming today you know!"
"Are you going to go give him a welcome kiss?"
"Have you seen the size of the airplane you give him to fly?"
"Just like americans to make everything so BIG!"

WTF? When was the last time you heard a group of people in the United States taunting a foreigner in public? That's grade-school behavior over here. I guess it's just good clean fun in France. And they call us savages!

....

And what did I do today? I bought four tires for the new car. French tires.   

Tube Tone on Board

[H]ardOCP tells us of a new motherboard soon to be offered by AOpen, aimed squarely at the audiophile end of the market:

One of the greatest gripes about onboard sound today in the mainboard market is the quality of the sound. While there have been solid advancements and onboard sound has certainly grown leaps and bounds in the last year, AOpen wanted to come in and do it like no other company has.

While no full specs were yet available to us, AOpen has taken a lead from the high-end audio component producers and used a vacuum tube system on their mainboard which they say produces overall sound quality that cannot be duplicated on silicon.

Well, that'll differentiate your product. And you thought it was hard cooling your CPU!

This has got to add at least $200 to the price of a mobo. Who would buy this? And more to the point, where am I going to fit that pair of mono-blocks in my mini-tower case?