Well, this is awkward. Just a week after a Sony executive told the Financial Times that Sony was "in talks with console rival Microsoft about offering a Blu-ray drive for the Xbox 360," console rival Microsoft corrected the record. Aaron Greenberg, group product manager for Xbox 360 (and all around pleasant guy), told Reuters rather unequivocally, "Xbox is not currently in talks with Sony or the Blu-ray Association to integrate Blu-ray into the Xbox experience."

Considering a not insignificant portion of the Xbox 360 owning audience has a now obsolete drive tethered to their 'box, we're unconvinced that the "Xbox experience" couldn't use a high-def optical format. Greenberg is quick to point out that Xbox 360 is "the only console offering digital distribution of entertainment content" which, to our continued great surprise (don't you own a movie studio, Sony?), is still true ... but for how long? We can't be sure of what makes sense to Microsoft bossman Ballmer, but we think just talking to the Blu-ray Association might be a good start.

[Via Engadget]

We're going to be honest with you: We hate MS points. It's not because they're inconvenient, if anything, they're too convenient, and far too easy to spend. Whenever we get a mittful of them it's like when we go to another country where the money looks so dissimilar to our own that we just pretend all the bills are gift certificates. If we were paid in MS points, we would be broke in a week.

One of the other (perhaps more concrete) issues that some users have is being forced to buy more points than they need, something that so annoyed 1UP's Patrick Klepek that he went out and found out why: "The reason why we do that, the core reason, is around credit card transaction fees," said Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg. "If we do this in bulk, we don't have to burden the consumer with the transaction fees, or ourselves or publishers."

...OK, you win this round, Greenberg. Now, explain why points aren't worth a penny a piece, and we'll treat you to a (child's size) ice cream in a flavor of your choice.

Things were a little different this year. For their second Xbox 360 Fall Dashboard Update, Microsoft decided to trickle the features out instead of dropping them on us all at once. Around Halloween, we realized things were awful quiet, so we asked you what you wanted to see in the Fall Update. On November 7, Microsoft kicked things off by announcing the Parental Timer, a feature we're certain you're all eager to try out. They followed that up on November 13 by confirming Xbox Originals, downloadable Xbox 1 games for your 360. On the 26th, they spilled the beans on the social-networky "Friends of Friends" feature, ostensibly to give paranoid folks some time to disable the functionality (which they can do here). Capping it all off a day later, MS Japan dropped some info, notably the ability to set your real name (your real name is xXsmokezmadbluntz420Xx?), your location, and a brief bio – more of that social networking stuff the kids are crazy about.

Finally, after what seemed an interminable wait, Microsoft was ready to let us in on the big picture. We spoke with Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg about next Tuesday's update and what was still in store. "There are three different categories that speak to a majority of the updates," Greenberg told us.