Link to Slashdot post
which links to the actual article.
Quote “XNA isn’t a rehash of DirectX tools for the Xbox2, PC and WinCE devices after all, it’s a full-on assault on the gaming world”
The torrent of the video is btw damn well seeded. Started at 40kbs, went to 90kbs after 20 seconds (maximum of my line) and was finished after 4minutes 
My connection is always slow, so I had to download the whole thing instead of streaming. 
What does XNA stand for anyways?
Who cares?
Cas
Quote from another interview
“XNA is this platform development system that we’re working with third party tool vendors, our own internal teams and our publishing and development partners to create. And the idea there is to really enable the people to produce better games in less time and more efficiently and really enable the game developers to focus on gameplay, and not what we would call plumbing. We’ve been very straightforward with people that that is the future software platform for all the work we’re doing.”
I have to think that it does matter, and we should care, because we (in the Java world) are just now catching up to DirectX with Java, and now MS is moving to even higher level tools and support, which Java is not yet at.
Just take a look at the file format support in the 3D space for Java, it’s bunk. Whether it’s Java3D, Xith or JOGL, we are lightyears behind the MS world.
Example: just to make it easier to create animated characters in our demos, TWO years ago we wrote a .x format loader for Java3D and now our JOGL renderer. It has worked the best for us because the free .x tools from MS really help out.
Imagine the day I had to make that desicion back 2002, “We are going to write a JAVA loader for a DirectX format?!” But it was a good decision, it paid off well.
Now they are going much higher, into a space were simple loaders aren’t going to compete…
This is entirely unsurprising. DirectX is a dedicated gaming technology built on the language of choice for games programming on the platform of choice for develpoment, C++ on Windows.
Java is still hopelessly lagged in the performance and resource requirements problems that it can’t quite shake off. Java is still unavailable on any console equipment and even if it were the runtime size and performance characteristics effectively mean it’ll be a complete failure anyway.
In the meantime the reasonably sensible suggestion that Sun produce the specification for a Java console with OpenGL/AL as its base rendering technology (as opposed to the hopeless AWT) that people have been mooting round these parts for at least 2 years has just staggeringly being ignored.
If Java doesn’t make it onto the next generation of consoles, its gaming history is over before it’s begun.
Cas
[quote]Who cares?
Cas
[/quote]
Good point.