You'll have to take a break from your sleepless search for Ice-T in Call of Duty 4 this coming Monday, as Microsoft announced this morning that in preparation for the divisive New Xbox Experience, Xbox Live will be offline for a full 24 hours on September 29. While this certainly suggests that the roll-out of the new dashboard business is imminent, there is no confirmation from Microsoft that this signifies the actual launch. I'm not totally sold on on all the avatar stuff, but I've seem the new dashboard in motion for myself, and it's pretty slick. I'm also very interested to see how well the play-from-hard-drive stuff works. The foolish optimist in me hopes we'll all find out come 12:00AM on September 30!
[UPDATE from Jeff]: Microsoft's Larry "Major" Hryb "Nelson" has gone ahead and pooped on Ryan's parade of foolish optimism and confirmed that this is prep work for the new 360 front-end, and that it isn't actually rolling out immediately after the service comes back online.