GeekSpeak for July 15, 2006
Microsoft's Xbox 360 Uncloaked
Author Dean Takahashi's book, Xbox 360 Uncloaked, is an in-depth study of people and stories behind creating this next-generation gaming console the Microsoft's Xbox 360.
In doing the research on this book Dean talked to a lot of people at Microsoft and in our discussion we cover gaming consoles, what it is like to work for Microsoft and some general talk about being a journalist.
[ Audio 24.6 MB mp3 ]Links
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MBARI Open House in Moss Landing is today, July 15th 2006 from noon to 5pm.
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Server virtualization (multiple virtual computers on a single physical computer) on the cheap with VMWare Server.
Dean Takahashi
Our Guest, Dean Takahashi, is a staff writer at the San Jose Mercury News, where he writes about video games, semiconductors, and other technology stories. He has been a journalist for 18 years, most of that time covering technology news. He previously worked at the Red Herring Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Times Orange County Edition, the Orange County Register, and the Dallas Times Herald.
He's an avid game player and lives in the San Jose Area with his wife and three kids. Dean is originally from Sacramento. He got a bachelors degree in English at UC Berkeley and a master's in journalism at Northwestern University. He published Opening the Xbox, a book about the making of Microsoft's first video game console, in 2002. And He has written The Xbox 360 Uncloaked, a sequel that covers the making of the Xbox 360.
Dean wrote his original Xbox book over 18 months, from August 2000 to March 2002. He formally started work on The Xbox Uncloaked in August, 2005, but drew from more than four years worth of notes, gathered while covering the video game industry, picking up from where his first book left off.
The book is an independent journalistic enterprise. Microsoft isn't paying Dean or pre-approving the book. They granted Dean access to top executives and key players, but he supplemented the reporting with his own investigations, using a wide array of sources and years of experience covering games, business and technology.
Dean's premier episode of GeekSpeak was August 8th 2002, in which we discussed his first book, Opening the Xbox.
