We noticed over at ActiveXbox there was a link to a new FAQ at the official support site for the Xbox. Among the interesting items were these:

Can the Xbox hook up to a Computer Monitor?
The Xbox video game system is intended for use with television sets. This focus allows gamers to enjoy the superior visual and sound capacity of high-definition and high-resolution television sets.

Can I play games on a network?
In the future, the broadband adapter will allow you to connect to online gaming sessions for multi-player gaming across the Internet.
Broadband capability is scheduled to go live in the summer of 2002. For more information, visit http://www.xbox.com.

Nothing here that is a real shock-- we've known for awhile that online support wouldn't be for awhile. However, the answer for the first question, while it doesn't come right out and say no , doesn't seem to say yes . It seems to be trying to say that televisions, or at least High Definition televisions, are superior to monitors, which is... interesting, to say the least. Maybe it's my eyes...

According to this BBC article, Microsoft announced the European launch date of the Xbox on Tuesday at a gala unveiling in Cannes, France at the home of designer Pierre Cardin.

The console will debut at a cost of £299 ($433). In comparison, Sony just lowered the price of the PlayStation 2 to to £199 ($288).

Microsoft is keen to avoid the problems Sony suffered with PS2 availability last year:

Sandy Duncan, vice-president X-Box EMEA, said 1.5 million consoles would be available in Europe in the first three months.

The article also notes that with the global economic downturn coinciding with Microsoft's launch of both the Xbox and Windows XP, the next four weeks are crucial to the long-term future of Microsoft. Indeed.

Louis Wu over at HBO pointed out an item over in their forum-- apprently Uriel spotted a mention of Halo and the Xbox over in the column by Dom, one of the MegaTokyo artists, in today's strip.

Dom calls the little aliens in Halo the most fun bastards to shoot (we assume he means grunts). But more telling is his experience with the Xbox controller:

There has seriously been a collective brain fart by the Xbox guys with this monstrosity. The testers for the controller must've been Manute Bol and a rhesus monkey with elephantiasis. There's no other explanation for something this bad.

I'm guessing that means he doesn't like it.

CoreMagazine.com has posted an interview with Microsoft games division vice president Ed Fries, responsible for the Xbox, and Yutaka Haruki, Japanese Xbox division manager. There are a few notes about the reduction in hard drive size, and the reduction of the Xbox's controller size (in Japan), but Halo also gets a mention when they asked Fries about the Xbox in the Japanese market:

Question: Do you think the predominately American software lineup will be accepted in Japan?

Fries: In the United States, 70% of the people who have reserved an Xbox also reserved the game Halo. We expect a similar figure in the Japanese market. In terms of boosting Japanese developer support, we've hired Toshiyuki Miyata from Sony to oversee localized development.

While we still don't know exactly how many Xbox preorders there have been, this does seem to solidify Halo's position as one of the Xbox's system-selling titles.

According to a story at cube.ign.com, Toys R Us, which sells online through Amazon.com, says they have sold out of Nintendo GameCube preorders-- and that it did so eight times faster than with the Xbox. They aren't releasing preorder numbers for either console, however. Thanks for the heads-up by Tobin on RHL.

ActiveXbox site claims Microsoft confirms change

Ok, bear with us while we follow the breadcrumbs on this one.

Ramses II posted an the halo.bungie.org forum about this story he saw at Shacknews about the Xbox's specs dropping again.

Shacknews posted a link to an Xbox news site called ActiveXbox (clever, eh?) where someone named Byron Hinson had this to say today:

Updated: Just recieved confirmation from Microsoft's XBox PR group that the spec is now officially 8GBs.

The original spec for the Xbox's HD was 10GB. But... we thought these things were already being manufactured in Guadalajara, Mexico...

FiringSquad, the gaming site started by Dennis Thresh Fong of Quake fame, has put together a daunting article examining the Xbox's hardware, comparing it not only to the PC architecture it owes its origins to, but also to that of the consoles it will compete against, the Sony PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo GameCube.There are far too many detailed points to mention them all here. However, one key item from the article is the idea that the shared-memory architecture, which was touted early on as its primary advantage against the PC, might not be such an advantage:

With a second vertex shader for extra geometry performance and an extra 33MHz, you might expect the XGPU to be hands-down faster than its PC sibling. What's missing from the equation is the fact that the XGPU does not have the same memory bandwidth in a GeForce3 PC setup. It's easy to see that the Xbox's DDR-RAM is clocked at 100MHz rather than the GF3's 230MHz. However, that's not the only disadvantage the XGPU faces. The Xbox has a shared memory architecture which means that memory bandwidth must be diverted for the system RAM.Looking at the published specs, the Xbox has a total of 6.4 GB/sec of bandwidth for the system and graphics. A GeForce3 with a Pentium III/PC133 SDRAM setup offers ~8.5 GB/sec, and the GF3 paired with an AMD Athlon on an nForce 420D with PC2100 DDR would give you 11.6GB/sec. Between the RDRAM and 2560-bit embedded DRAM, the PlayStation2 boasts a total of 51.2GB/sec!

Of course, as the saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and hardware specifications. The proof will be in the playing. At least there's not too much longer to wait; about six weeks now.