Microsoft: Next Xbox will work even when your Internet doesn’t
According to an internal Microsoft e-mail sent to all full-time employees working on the next Xbox, “Durango [the codename for the next Xbox] is designed to deliver the future of entertainment while engineered to be tolerant of today’s Internet.” It continues, “There are a number of scenarios that our users expect to work without an Internet connection, and those should ‘just work’ regardless of their current connection status. Those include, but are not limited to: playing a Blu-ray disc, watching live TV, and yes playing a single player game.”
Playing a Blu-ray disc? Watching live TV without an Internet connection? Very interesting.
Ed Bott 
While this matches up with other rumours, and I’ve never doubted you for a second in the past – are you sure of the source of this?
It just seems odd to me that someone at Microsoft would feel the need to tell “full-time employees working on the next Xbox” exactly what the next Xbox is going to do. Surely they know this already?
What was the purpose of the full email?
In the new Microsoft, lots of pieces of information are compartmentalized. It is certainly reasonable for me to assume that some non-trivial number of employees in the Xbox group have detailed knowledge of the features they are working on but don’t know details about other features.
As for the source, I have a great deal of confidence in the judgment and experience of the author of this post, Peter Bright.
People really don’t realize what this means today. So many devices are now “always on”. And Intel’s next line of processors is even going to support this scenario. These devices are not “ON” as we knew it in the past. But rather they are in a sudo-sleep mode, and may be “OFF” for most purposes, but still alive enough to handle background tasks and work with data. So many just do not understand this otherwise simple concept. The easiest example is modern smartphones. But even in a more extreme mode of sleep, that the smartphones don’t even do quite yet is on the horizon. I’d like to see some real articles that go deep into the future of this technology and how we will benefit from it. Up to the effort Ed? 🙂 Or do you know of some good one’s that we can push to folks?
Yeah, but if it doesn’t have a START button… OMGWTF TORCHES & PITCHFORKS!
The gem there is “live tv”. Now let the rumors and speculation begin.
Of course it could just mean media center.