But will they do away the stupid points/currency system? I have found myself using the Xbox Zune more than iTunes but hate the stupid points/currency they use. Can I just see what I am buying in dollars?!

They can raise prices by making points more expensive, and don't have to re-price everything else.

Points * 1.25 / 100 = Dollars.

Assuming retail price for points purchased.

why not just use dollars or cents directly?

they don't want you to directly associate points with dollars. the dissociation allows you to spend points more freely than you would dollars

I'm pretty sure I actually spend less on Xbox Live than I would if everything were done with straight money transactions because it is virtually impossible to buy enough points to cover things you want to buy without having leftover unspent points, the existence of which (even if temporary) makes me feel wasteful.

eg. Ok, I would like to buy this indie game for XXX points, but I need to buy points in blocks of YYY dollars which means after I buy this I'll have 200 unused points sitting in my account for who knows how long... screw it, I didn't really want that indie game that bad anyway.

Granted this is just one view of the situation and I may be an anomaly, but for me the whole point<->money system causes me to think too much which pretty much kills off any potential for impulse purchases.

Straight up dollar values and a click-to-buy system as streamlined as Amazon one click is what gets my money.

YMMV.

i'm the same way, but i'm guessing most people don't think like you and i.

Psychology.

I feel like the Xbox 360 is doing to console gaming what XP did to the OS market. Which is only making me more leery about investing in their future consoles. The Xbox 360 will not go away any time soon, but could this also hurt their future console? Will it be able to stay up to date when the next greatest thing comes out?

ABC iView access later this month in Australia! Seriously great news, since I don't have access to live television where I am.

this is microsoft's trojan horse that analysts aren't paying that much attention to in the living room wars (google/apple/etc)

Fails to mention that you need gold subscription for any of those, including Netflix.

Interesting. The problem with Xbox is that every time I turn mine on, it has to do an update. By the time it's done updating, I've forgotten why I turned it on. It is also louder than many commercial aircraft, drowning out whatever you might be doing on it.

So for TV, I just use a tiny computer under my TV, which can download stuff from Usenet and play it without requiring updates or nine billion cubic feet of air per minute.

The original Xbox 360s were incredibly noisy; the recent slim-factor models are much quieter—especially when running games off the HDD.

Updates, though, are very infrequent—I'd guesstimate about one every four months (although individual game updates can be much more frequent).

It's interesting you mention using a computer instead. The reason I like game consoles for gaming so much more is that they remove all the hassle of configuration and hardware issues—you just put the disc in and play. It looks like this'll be the case with TV as well.

Do you only turn your Xbox on every 6 months? Dashboard updates are very infrequent.

Agreed, I use my Xbox several times a week and I think it has updated 3 times total in the last 2 years.

I can't tell if you're just randomly anti-MS trolling here or if you're confusing a 360 with a PS3? Because PSN updates all the damn time, and Xbox 360 dashboard updates no more than every 6 months.