This seems to be a fairly complex hardware hack to pull off, and it only works 25% of the time. This will possibly satisfy the hardcore homebrew community, but I have doubts about whether they'll be able to refine the process into a single low-cost mod-chip.<p>This is definitely a good step forward though. At this rate by the time the 360 is retired from the marketplace we'll have a reliable boot method that allows everyone to turn their old 360s into media servers/toasters/whatever.
While I have only the most elementary understanding of the concepts these exploits use (even more elementary in such a low-level hack as this), there's always an undeniable bit of adventure to reading them. It's espionage and subterfuge on a microscopic and high-frequency scale.
This might be a bit of a leap, but I really hope this ends up in Xbox Media Center / Boxee for the 360. I'm not sure how difficult porting x86 code to PowerPC is (aside from endianness), but a guy can dream.