As an 11-year-old, I managed to persuade my mum to buy a Double-Screen Donkey Kong Game & Watch for me when we visited NY, and then, what with the bleeps and the profanities emanating from my seat during the eight-hour return flight, she confiscated it. Between ordering a double whisky from the trolley dolly, and settling down with a Harold Robbins she'd picked up at JFK, she left my Donkey Kong in the seat pocket in front of her, tucked between the vomit bag and the safety instructions.

And there it stayed. When we arrived back in London, neither of us, groggy from the cloud of fug produced by the woman with the fuschia nails, tight perm and camel toe in the row behind us, who had chain-smoked a whole carton of fags during the journey while she chatted up the fat man next to her, thought to rescue the Game & Watch from its hiding place.

In the car I cried all the way home. And what made it worse was that when I got back to school and told my friends that Mum had bought me one, but we'd left it on the plane, none of them believed me and, between the bleeps of their Game & Watch consoles, accused me of being a fantasist. You know, the older I get, the more I think they were right. [Goteking via Gizmodo Japan]

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A little over a year ago, one of the people in my group modded an Xbox, installed Avalaunch, and put all sorts of Xbox mod scene apps on the box, like XBMC, RSS readers, etc, along with some "backup" games. :rolleyes: He brought this box along to a meeting with Bill Gates. Bill saw a demo of this, was quite impressed, and asked something along the lines of "How can we engage this community?" - instead of saying something like "How can we squash this?" It's long been on the back of everyone's minds in the Xbox group - how can we get students and hobbyists involved without disrupting the console business model? The good news is that it's still on the radar, we'll see what happens in the future.

That's quite interesting that there would be legitimacy given to the Xbox mod scene by Gates. Maybe instead of saying how they can engage them, maybe Microsoft should be figuring out how they can learn from them. The XBMC mod for Xbox is light-years ahead of the media playback capabilities of the Xbox 360. If they could somehow catch up even halfway, with DivX playback and media storage, many of these Xbox modders would jump on the 360.

But, it's nice to see that they're paying attention to what's going on and actively trying to make their product better. – Jason Chen

Is Bill Gates learning from the mod community? [Ars Technica]