Jeremiah Gilliam of the Bronx has been arrested today after police officers found dozens of laptops, GPS devices and video game consoles in his apartment. How did the cops find him? Because he tried playing one of the stolen Xbox 360s online and signed in using the Xbox Live account saved on the system.
The youth whose Xbox had been stolen, was playing online at a friend’s house and saw his own Xbox Live name sign in, prompting the family to call the police who then traced the IP address back to the address where Gilliam was staying.
The criminal was under investigation already for 13 robberies, and police suspect he broke into as many as 200 cars and homes in Westchester County.
“On the day of the burglary, the victim used another Xbox and saw his system was already online,” said one of the arresting officers. “At the house, we found Xboxes, PlayStations, GPS units, laptops — a total of 53 items, including stolen credit cards.”
Gilliam has been charged with grand larceny.
Result for: xbox 360s
According to an independent report by the warranty company SquareTrade, the Nintendo Wii is the most reliable of the current generation consoles, while the Xbox 360 remains the console with the highest system failure rate.
After two years of ownership, Wii owners reported only a 2.7 percent failure rate, with the PS3 in the middle at 10 percent, and the 360 at 23.7 percent. Excluding RROD errors, which are covered by a Microsoft warranty for 3 years, the Xbox 360 still had an 11.7 percent failure rate.
The sample size for the study was 16,000 units, but there are some notable facts to note. Most of the Wii failures were due to power issues and most of the non-RROD errors for the Xbox 360 was “Disc Read errors,” the same as the PS3. Usage was also a factor, because the Wii, according to Nielsen numbers, is just about half of that of the Xbox 360. The report says the average 360 console is played or used for 1191 minutes per month, followed by the PS3 at 1053 and the Wii lagging way behind at 516.
Perhaps more notably, the report concludes that the new “Jasper” based Xbox 360s, which began shipping in late 2008, have almost completely killed RROD, and SquareTrade expects the failure rate to continue to fall as 2009 continues.
You can read the full PDF here: SquareTrade console reliability PDF
Result for: xbox 360s
According to Microsoft marketing executive James Halton, XBL users will soon have access to Facebook and Twitter via their Xbox 360s “before Christmas,” in line with expectations.
“A lot of the background work’s been done for a lot of the applications that are coming,” says Halton, via Eurogamer. “It will be before Christmas.”
The exec did rule out that the services could be integrated into the upcoming August dashboard update, but said they would be available afterwards, and separately.
The functionality was first showed off at the E3 event earlier this year.
Says GI.biz, “the services will enable users to link Xbox Live friends with their Facebook profiles, share photos ad status updates and capture in-game moments to upload instantly to a Facebook application.”
