Xbox 360's Seriously Flawed DVD Playback

Maybe it's a good thing that I didn't throw out my standalone DVD player and make my Xbox 360 an all-in-one media hub. As ExtremeTech reports: 

Frankly, the Xbox 360 is a terrible DVD player. Yeah, we know it's primarily a game console. We know DVD movie playback is essentially a "free" feature. But it is a feature nonetheless, and an important one. After all, many of our TVs only have so many inputs, and we only have so much room for boxes in our TV cabinets or stands. If you have an Xbox 360, you have no reason to believe that you shouldn't be able to use it as your primary DVD player. Except that you can't, because it's awful. Honestly, we have seen sub-$100 DVD players and PC graphics cards perform better than this.

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Running Vista on a Mac

Funnily enough, Macs are great machines for running Vista. They're new, they're fast and they exceed Vista’s demanding specs. They can even run OS X and Windows at the same time.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been running Vista on a quad-Xeon Mac Pro. Click the link to see how it’s working out.

The Mac Pro is a very fast and capable OS X machine, but it’s an even faster Windows Vista machine.

Vista really flies on this beast, and feels like it’s faster than OS X – it boots faster, folders burst open and apps launch instantly.

(The Mac Pro has two dual-core 2.66GHz Xeon chips; 3GBs of RAM; and a medium-range NVidia GeForce 7300 GT graphics card)

I’m especially delighted with Vista’s “glass” Aero interface, which works in all its glory on this machine.

Source: WIRED Blogs: Cult of Mac