It’s a big (weird) trend in geek circles right now to go out and plunk down a lot of money for the latest tech goodies, take them home, unpack them and disassemble them. Then put pics of the whole grisly operation up on flickr. And what’s the hottest gadget to come down the pike in the last three days? Why, the Xbox 360 of course. And it’s already been dissected.

Seems like good stuff inside even if it does crash like Lindsay Lohan in her “Saturday” Mercedes.

I was looking at a box of old game systems the other day–Segas, two old NES’s–and thinking how closed that hardware was back then. Sega was much closer than Nintendo and always was (they were the first to build a console with its own real OS), but the 360 has USB ports, a standard ATA hard drive; all in all it’s essentially just a purpose-built, hot-rodded Mac with a boot loader instead of a full kernel.

Still you’ve gotta respect these guys who drop $1000 on something that they turn around and risk blowing out from static just for our amusement.