Try Universally GREEDY.

While they may want to try and break iTunes' and Apple's dominance, it's a strange marketing choice. If they don't make it available for purchase, then I can't buy it. And no, I'm not going to go chasing around all over the place trying to find where the heck I CAN buy it.

It will be interesting to compare their approach to EMI's DRM free iTunes plus approach, which has prompted me to buy a couple of albums I wasn't really needing, but what the heck. Universal probably wants to be able to charge the higher iTunes Plus rate without giving anything more in value to the consumer. Gee, I wonder how that's going to work out for them.

1) they haven't set up mechanism to get a refund on repairs per their own website @

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/systemuse/xbox360/resources/warrantyupdate.htm

2) they haven't responded to any inquiries about this, yet. Nor have they provided any place or contact to ask about this issue

3) they haven't explained how they will determine who has a red ring of death failure and who has some other failure

I just spent $140 and 5 weeks of daily calls to somewhere in India and UPS to track one their 'repairs'. Actually they don't repair your box, they give you someone else's box which has already been returned and repaired. So statistically your probability of subsequent failures increases with each next failure. There are some people out there who have documented cases of more than 7 failures in a row.

I am waiting for my refund but based on the experience with XBox customer 'service' I won't hold my breath. XBox customer service is bar none, the absolute worst on the planet, without exception.

Looking at a "week in review," one normally gets some kind of perspective. This week's theme seems to be how lust for power - the kind of lust for the latest, fastest, shininest gadget - can turn and bite you back.

To begin with, I have little patience with electronic gamers. Whether they're the ones who burn out the CPU's in their computers through "overclocking" so their virtual military murderer can get a shot off half a second faster than their buddy down the block, or the ones seeking the latest game system that are being made deliberately scarce by the manufacturers to excite the junkies even more, they're all stupid. They're the ones being "gamed."

The XBox problem, according to one guy on democraticunderground.com, involves overheating. The processor and peripheral chips are overheating in that tiny little box with no fan. It has no fan because the noise would interrupt the death screams coming from the game the user is playing. So, it seems to be a problem between the Microsoft system designers who wanted to get a product out the door before testing it, and the Chinese slaves who put together the systems and who may have skimped on component quality. Either way, the driving force seems to be the game junkies - who are proud to be game junkies. Funny, I don't see people in the ghetto wearing T-shirts saying "I'm proud to shoot up smack."

As for the iPhone, which Mr. Manjoo was duped enough to wait in line for, and who hyped it incessantly in this column, I'm awaiting his tears of agony when someone puts out a virus designed for it. It's inevitable, since the idiots who bought the iPhone have too much money and too much desire to waste it, the ideal targets for identity theft. That is, if the things don't blow up after a week of use.

All of this illustrates how little wisdom is used by people who buy this crap. Wisdom might suggest that people wait until these devices are proven, burned-in and thrown down a set of stairs to see if they still work. But that would be too dangerous to the bottom line of Microsoft or Apple.

Yes everything is an antiglobalist neo Marxist nanny state I am a snob and so know better than thou screed.

Fact is meng, that yes heat is an issue. But the electrical engineers on democraticunderground (which is where I go for all my intel on embedded systems design) are off the mark. It's also how the mobo is designed to say nothing of the zero diagnostics it offers up to the consumer. Tell your systems designers on MoveOn.org to also check the seating between the memory and the mobo connectors at they are known to come loose as well. There is also a problem with connection between the CEC and the mobo. Since the technicians on Chomsky.com are am I'm sure aware that it's not a pure single chip sur-mount design.

"tomreedtoon":

Unlike Bill Gates, Steve Jobs isn't stupid enough to taunt people to write a virus for a iPhone. I also highly doubt it would have as many gaping holes in it's security since it uses OSX. What you call "crap" is actually an amazing device, but you probably wouldn't know that because you've probably never tried one. Mine kicks ass and is way easier to use than any phone I've ever used. Before you spout off about durability, maybe you should watch this:

http://www.pcworld.com/video/id,545-page,1-bid,0/video.html

Then throw yourself down a set of stairs!

The iPhone is technology for Rich Boys. It is not for the common man. Period. It's fun for the Kool Kids, but for someone who's barely able to make rent payments each month, it is NOT an essential, any more than a Maserati is.

And as for RealName, sensitive about your right-wing politics, aren't you? Perhaps you'd be more impressed if you got advice from the Freepers, who'd blame the XBox problem on Clinton. For the record, there are people on Democratic Underground that talk more than politics; they have a pretty good grounding in the real world.

Why not take the question to a tech site? If I'd asked anybody on, say, Slashdot or CNET, the answer I'd get from the community would be "Who cares about some lame-o burn-outs? It's KOOOOOOOOOL! Smoke a Doob!" But there are some people who might want to know about the reliability of the mind-destroying device they waited in line for hours to buy for their kid.

And it does have real-world ramifications. If I buy a router from Microsoft, is it going to be reliable or a piece of crap? Or if I buy anything with a made-in-China label, will I have to worry about it catching fire five minutes after I plug it in? The columnists on tech web sites won't answer that question, since their advertisers are the ones selling the Towering Inferno game systems. And, sadly, no one will reliably advise on it here on Salon, either.