Microsoft Discontinues Support for Original Xbox Games

Microsoft Discontinues Support for Original Xbox Games The FBI wants your ISP to tract you. Google might be getting real time speech and a new government campaign will send you text about your pregnancy for free. It’s Monday, February eight I'm Natalie Del Conte and it’s time to get loaded. Microsoft is going to discontinue support for original Xbox games on its online service, not right away but this will end by April 15. In a blog post, Microsoft said this isn’t a decision we made lightly but after careful consideration, it is clear that this will provide the greatest benefit to the Xbox live community. I’m sure this is going to make some people vehemently unhappy but Microsoft seems to want to put its resources into natal instead of older Xbox games but it does make me wonder, is Microsoft that hard up for resources these days? Nick Nouwen books popped back up in the Amazon Kindle store on Friday and the prices are well above Amazon’s $9.99 desired price. Some books are now as high as $14.99 and you better bet that the other publishers are going to look into hiking their prices soon too. The FBI wants internet service providers to record which websites costumers visit and also keep those logs for up to two years. The argument for that is that it could help law enforcement investigate child pornography. Forget the fact that it does what most of us are against and turns the ISP into a policing agency. Also, ISPs are hardly set up to do this. A spokes person from Verizon told CNET that they don’t have an infrastructure in place to keep URL information like this plus no one does this now and in my opinion; bad idea, it probably won’t ever happen. Google may be getting into real time speech-to-speech translation from one language to another. According to their head of translation service, Franz Och, I hope I’m saying his name right. He says, “We think speech-to-speech translations should be possible and work very reasonable well in a few years time. Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high accuracy machine translation and high accuracy voice recognition. AT&T launched an act to track for family more obsessively, the AT&T Family Map App will show you where your family or friends are on an iPhone Map, you can assign a name and a photo to each person you’re stalking or tracking, you can also perform schedule text to see if someone is running on schedule and get text and email alerts if you they are not. A new government text campaign will help expecting mommies get tips and tricks on how to have a successful pregnancy. If you text BABY to 511-411, you’ll get weekly text time to your due date, assuming you’re pregnant which actually I assume most of my audience is not. But never the less, this is interesting because it’s a government sponsored initiative to help prevent birth defects and unhealthy pregnancies. Also, it’s interesting because the carriers have agreed to waive texting fees for all of these texts. Samsung is planning to launch their super AMOLED Smartphone at the Mobile World Congress Show next week. Not a lot of details on this one but the device will reportedly have an 800x480 pixel display with the phone panel five times clear and 20% more visible outdoors. We’re hearing that would most likely run Samsung Bada Operating system but will surely have more information on this next week. The Winter Olympics start on Friday and the International Olympic Committee is going to allow athletes to embrace Twitter. The IOC twitted its own rules for bloggers which stated, “Athletes, go ahead and tweet as long as it is about your own personal experience at the game.” The same rules apply to other social networks such as Facebook or MySpace. Those are all your headlines for today. I will see you tomorrow with more. Thank you for watching. I’m Natali Del Conte with Cnet TV and you’ve just been loaded.