I'm tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The "This will work in the next version." The "It's in our roadmap." The "Buy now and upgrade later." The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn't tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I'm tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. We need a change.

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Earlier this month we learned that a California man has decided to sue Microsoft over RRoD issues claiming that the company new around 50% of the consoles shipped were defective (some claim the figure could be as high as 68 percent.) As you know, Microsoft extended their warranty plan at great expense to help cover their arse, but having to send back consoles repeatedly wears real thin, real fast. So, I am curious to know: how many times have you danced with the RRoD?

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If there's one eerie light to avoid this Halloween night, it's the RRoD pumpkin.
Its eyes will glow bright yet you'll discover with a fright, it's the RRoD pumpkin.
You can try as you might but Halo won't play, right? It's the RRoD pumpkin. [flickr via DVICE]

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Someone looking to make a quick buck has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft at the Sacramento County Superior Court claiming that an excessive number of Xbox 360s have fallen victim to the dreaded "red ring of death" (and that Microsoft covered up the issue to stay afloat in the console wars with Sony and Nintendo). In addition to seeking damages, the plaintiff is looking for the introduction of a refund program in the state of California.

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Dean Takahashi, one of the most respected tech journos around, spent years putting together this mind-blowing expose that reveals the truly epic scale of the problems that lead to millions of dead Xbox 360s. It really is one of the most stunning flustercucks in gaming history. According to his account, Microsoft willfully ignored deep, systemic problems in the console's production that reached from chipmakers—initially, only 16 out of every 100 of its IBM-made processors worked—to production lines, where just before launch, an unbelievable 68 percent of consoles made were clunkers.

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Microsoft's red ring Xbox 360 problems have cost the company about a billion dollars in warranty repairs, but the research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner said that the hardware problems were caused because Microsoft wanted to be cheap. Instead of using an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) vender to make a graphics chip for the 360, Microsoft decided to design it themselves and have Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing create it. This saved "tens of millions of dollars" in design costs. Yes, only tens of millions.

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Irresistible Xbox 360 red ring of death heatsink jokes aside, this glow-in-the-dark replacement shell from XCM is the bee's knees for gamers who like to do it in the dark. Even with the lights on the case is still pretty cool, as it sports a semi-translucent look, allowing onlookers to marvel at the melting electronics housed within.

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The Ulysses spacecraft, which was launched way back in 1990, has been visiting the planets of the solar system for some 17-years, but now the Ulysses looks like it is doomed. A critical error has occurred in the mechanism that prevents the fuel from freezing, and that means the Ulysses is soon to be heading to spacecraft heaven.

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