The latest Xbox 360 System Update appears to be causing major problems for gamers today. Speaking from personal experience, the update appears to be completely breaking Xbox Live for some users.

The symptom is that your console will say that Xbox Live requires an update, then you’ll try to run the update and after several minutes, the update fails. It then provides advice that you need to test your connection, which eventually tells you that you need an Xbox Live update to complete the tests. I even went as far as reformatting the hard drive on my 360 to make sure there wasn’t some corrupted data on there.

A number of users over on Major Nelson’s site are also reporting similar problems this morning. Microsoft hasn’t provided any information yet on when a fix might be available. I even sat on the 1-800-4MY-XBOX line for about 90 minutes earlier this morning to see if they could provide any insight, but eventually got disconnected and gave up.

…and I thought I’d be checking out that new Stranglehold demo tonight. Oh well, hopefully someone in Redmond is listening.

Japanese manufacturer Shimafuji has developed the Space Wire Cube PC. The system manages manages to cram an entire PC into a 2-inch cube that fits in the palm of your hand.

The miniscule machine starts out with a 200MHz or 300MHZ, 64-bit CPU and 64MB of RAM. For connectivity, it includes most of the essential ports you’d want for a basic PC, including USB, Serial, Ethernet and VGA. Storage is achieved with 16MB of internal flash memory as well as a CF memory slot, which should provide plenty of expansion capability.

I can’t wait to set up an entire server farm running on these tiny systems, place them in a tiny rack, then only host web sites for ants.

[via PCLaunches]

The impending version 1.80 upgrade adds a couple of new features, but the most significant one purportedly adds upscaling of DVD, Playstation and PlayStation 2 games to as much as 1080p resolution. I’m very interested to see how this all works, especially to see if the game upscaling works on US and Japan (hardware backwards compatible) consoles or only on the European (emulation-based) versions of the system.

In addition, the new release will add remote PSP play across the internet, and playback of media content stored on DLNA3 (Digital Living Network Alliance V3) enabled PCs and other devices.

The update should start rolling out on May 24th (at least in Europe). Sony’s PS3 system update page should have more details once the firmware is released.

Given the current dearth of games for Sony’s big black box, I’m beginning to feel like I spend more time downloading firmware updates than actually playing games.

[via MaxConsole]

According to this post by Ozymandias (who happens to work for Microsoft,) the Xbox 360 reserves approximately 32MB of it’s RAM for the System, including the kernel, device drivers, Xbox Guide, friends lists, voice/text messages, achievement lists, gamercards, Live Marketplace, 1-1 chat, virtual keyboard, and the music player. That leaves about 480MB of RAM for game developers use any way they want.

In contrast, the PlayStation 3 is estimated to use about 96MB for System overhead, plus an additional 9MB for friends list functionality. So right out of the gate, PlayStation 3 developers end up with 73MB less available RAM than an Xbox 360 title with the same basic features enabled. Plus, it’s reported that in-game e-commerce capability wastes another 60MB of RAM. On top of all this, Sony’s memory architecture says that 50% of all RAM is for graphics, and the other 50% is for application use, further limiting developer freedom.

These memory architecture decisions, along with the reduction in available memory could be part of why cross-platform titles are looking better on the Xbox 360 than on the PS3, especially for games that started on the 360 and were ported to the PS3.

You’ll be able to queue up to six files for download at once, and can continue to use many features (not gameplay, though [UPDATE: According to 1UP, it sounds like downloads may actually continue during offline games.]) while your files download.

In addition to the downloading improvements, the 1.60 system upgrade will add a variety of other enhancements:

• Folding@home: Provides PS3 owners with a way to donate processing cycles to Stanford University’s medical research projects (the PS3 is said to process these simulations about 20x to 30x faster than a typical PC, so it could really make an impact here)
• Text Entry and Web Browsing Improvements: Addition of a full QWERTY on-screen keyboard; Better zoom capabilities in the web browser; Reduced text flicker on interlaced monitors
• Remote Play: Access photos, videos and music from your nearby Sony PSP via Wi-Fi
• Disc Auto-Start: Ability to set a preference of whether or not your discs should automatically start when inserted
• Compatibility with Blu-ray Disc Rewritable (BD-RE) disks

While waiting for PS3 updates to download is never fun, I do have to say I admire Sony for making such frequent improvements to their console. More details on PlayStation 3 system updates can be found here.