Sony cuts price of PlayStation 3 to $410
Sony Corp said Friday it will slash the price of its much-anticipated PlayStation 3 video game console in Japan by 20 percent, heating up the competition in the next-generation gaming war against rivals Microsoft and Nintendo.
The announcement comes just days after Microsoft Corp. announced that it would roll out an external high definition DVD player [...]
Students fight for Skype
An effort by San Jose State University to ban the Skype phone service has been put on hold in the face of fierce objections from students and staff.
Administrators said they would meet with eBay, the owner of Skype, on Tuesday in order to give the San Jose-based company an opportunity to address the university’s concerns [...]
Conroe-L, the brains behind Apple’s iTV?
Back in May, we mentioned the emergence of Intel roadmaps featuring the mysterious Conroe-L, a single-core processor from Intel aimed at the very lowest end of the PC market. Even though Conroe-L is based on the Conroe/Merom microarchitecture that powers the Core 2 Duo line, the budget-oriented processor will have only one core, which will [...]
RIAA requests help from colleges to end network piracy
In its latest strategy for dealing with illegal file sharing on college campuses, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is asking for help from college administrators to deal with the growing trend of students sharing copyrighted files on local area networks (LANs).
LAN file sharing allows students to download large amounts of copyrighted music and [...]
Ex-RIAA agency “can’t find” artists it owes money to, like Public Enemy
Fred von Lohmann sez,
SoundExchange (which is in charge of collecting and distributing royalties collected from satellite radio and webcasting) can’t seem to locate the artists to whom these royalties are to be paid. If the monies are not disbursed, SoundExchange gets to keep them. Apparently SoundExchange was worried about publishing the [...]
Music Downloads: Pirates—or Customers?
Internet music piracy not only doesn’t hurt legitimate CD sales, it may even boost sales of some types of music.
Those were the counterintuitive findings released in March by Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee and his co-author Koleman Strumpf, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their paper, “The Effect of File Sharing [...]
A SetTop Box of Murdoch’s Dreams
What if you could build a set top box, that could take high definition video input from satellite, and at the same time be able to take standard definition Internet video over Broadband and display both of them on your television? And while you are at it, throw in a personal video recorder for good [...]
Microsoft Media Player shreds your rights
THINK DRM WAS bad already? Think I was joking when I said the plan was to start with barely tolerable incursions on your rights, then turn the thumbscrews? Welcome to Windows Media Player 11, and the rights get chipped away a lot more. Get used to the feeling, if you buy DRM infected media, you [...]
Microsoft rivals seen lobbying EU about Vista
Adobe suggests a ban incorporating free competing software into new operating system, while Symantec due to discuss security features to regulators next week.
Two U.S. software firms are asking the European Commission to take action against Microsoft’s new Vista operating system, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
Adobe Systems (Charts) has told EU regulators that Microsoft should [...]
More Details Surface on Upcoming, iPod Phone
Apple is widely expected to release an iPod phone, and more details are now surfacing. The highly-anticipated device, already the source of constant chatter, will offer a natural progression for the current iPod lineup. Already, Apple has brokered a deal with Motorola, a move that resulted in several iTunes-enabled devices – including the recent MotoRAZR [...]
