Noticed at Ars Technica yesterday and Wired today about a joint announcement issued recently about how “Microsoft has licensed leading-edge semiconductor processor technology from IBM for use in future Xbox products and services to be announced at a later date.” It was also confirmed that this processor technology was a PowerPC and that it was going to be the main processor.

What’s curious about this is that Microsoft has built up a considerable library of titles compatible with the x86 architecture (i.e. XBox) and now decides to switch to the PowerPC platform? For what, 64-bit computing? Hello, AMD64 is x86 and 64-bit. Maybe it’s price?

Regardless, the question of compatibility is supposedly answered by Microsoft’s acquisition of VirtualPC, which is virtual machine software for Mac and PC used to run PC software on a Mac (and consequently the PowerPC architecture.)

I picked up Dan Simmons’ Illium this weekend and I am about a hundred pages in. It’s simply fantastic. The man certainly has a talent. Unfortunately, it was hardcover so I had to sell a kidney to afford it.

Other than that, not a whole lot else exciting going on, so I’ll leave it at that.