News written by James Delahunty (November, 2008)

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) UK boss Ray Maguire has said that Sony must work harder on promoting the cross-platform functionality between its home console, the PlayStation 3 (PS3) and the PlayStation Portable (PSP). When the PS3 was first launched, more emphasis was put on the functionality between the two devices than now, as the focus has moved more towards the game line-up than PS3 features in order to boost sales.

"When we first started - because all the functionality [on the PS3] was radical - we talked about that functionality," he told GamesIndustry.biz last month. "And in doing that, maybe we weren't strong enough on the games side of it. Now, with the strength of the games we've got coming out, this Christmas we're definitely about the games. From our own first party, and also third party, there's a feast of games for PS3 this year."

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has praised anti-piracy raids targeted counterfeit games in Mexico. Mexico's law enforcement carried out raids that led to the seizure of about 20 tons of pirate video games. About 40 officers from he region's Procuraduría General de la República and Agencia Federal de Investigación organisations raided booths and uncovered 91,200 fake games products.

Mexican law enforcement officials operated in conjunction with local ESA representatives to conduct this raid. "Piracy in markets such as San Juan de Dios hurts businesses engaging in the legitimate distribution and retailing of computer and video games," said Michael D Gallagher, CEO of the ESA.

He continued: "We commend Mexican law enforcement officials for their actions in this raid and are committed to fully supporting authorities around the world who conduct these kinds of enforcement actions."

A recent update to AVG 8 has caused massive headaches for its owner and for many users who ended up with a crippled Windows XP operating system. At the core of the problem is a false positive of user32.dll, a vital Windows Operating System file, which the updated AVG 8 reported as a trojan horse. Upon the false detection, the AVG update prompted the user to delete the file to fix the problem, which in turn could result in Windows XP endlessly rebooting.

The problem affected the Windows XP operating system with SP2 or SP3 installed. It didn't affect systems using Windows XP in the English language, but affected Windows installations using the Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish languages. Upon noticing the problem, an update to fix it was immediately pushed out.

"AVG is actively working to remedy the problem some users are experiencing related to the most recent update to commercial and free versions of AVG 7.5 and AVG 8.0 in some languages. A number of users who installed the update mistakenly received a warning that the Windows system file user32.dll product version 5.1.2600.3099 was infected with a Trojan virus and were prompted to delete a file essential to the operation of Windows XP." a company representative said.

NVIDIA has introduced the latest version of its Quadro GFX card for the business sector. The Quadro FX 5800 marks the first time that a GFX card has been loaded with 4GB of graphics memory. Even NVIDIA's dual GPU enthusiast video cards like the 9800 GX2 only sport 2GB of memory. "The size and complexity of data is growing at an exponential rate. The challenge for today's professional is to make sense of the mountain of data by distilling it into a form they can comprehend, analyze, and use to make impactful decisions," NVIDIA's Jeff Brown, GM of professional solutions said in a statement.

He continued: "At stake can be billions of investment dollars, or even people's lives. The Quadro FX 5800 has advanced features to allow massive datasets to be viewed beyond traditional 3D enabling professionals to make fast and accurate decisions." The FX 5800 offers up to 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores and supports interactive 4D modeling with time-lapse capability.

The FX 5800 supports both Open GL and DirectX 10 applications. NVIDIA says the level of performance offered by the new powerful card is needed for demanding environments like oil/gas exploration and medical imaging. The technology comes with a sobering MSRP of $3,499.

Last year the U.S. Military moved to block access to YouTube from troops and government employees, citing bandwidth usage problems with the services. Now, in co-operation with Seattle startup Delve Networks, it has launched a video sharing website for troops, their families and supporters. Members of the branches of the armed forces, their families, civilian Defense Department employees and supporters can join the service and upload videos.

TroopTube is tightly monitored however, with all video submissions being reviewed by Pentagon employees before they are added to filter out everything from threats to national security to copyright infringing content. Delve developed the technology to approve and sort incoming videos, as well as technology that makes several different video sizes and streams whichever is best suited for the users' Internet connection.

Delve Chief Executive Alex Castro called TroopTube a "retention tool" which is aimed at a new generation of soldiers who bring laptops and other portable gadgets to the front line with them. "A lot of people are excited in the company to be doing something for the people who make sacrifices," said Castro. "We're proud of this."

While the sale of video games dropped 21 percent in the third quarter in Japan, sales reported in the UK and the United States continued to grow despite the very visible economic woes. NPD Group, GfK Chart-Track Ltd. and Enterbrain Inc. all reported that video game sales grew by 15 percent in the third quarter and 8 percent in the United States. Overall, the sales of the three combined markets rose just 1 percent with Japan keeping the figure down.

"2007 was a banner year for the Japanese software market with the titles released in the third quarter of 2008 not being as highly anticipated as those released during the same time period in 2007," said Ricky Tanimoto, a global marketing analyst at Enterbrain. "Also, software titles generally have stronger launch sales in Japan, which represent a large percentage of the total sales in Japan compared to the US and Britain."

He said that overall video games sales in Japan will be largely unaffected by economic problems during the holiday season. "New portable hardware systems like Sony's PSP-3000 and Nintendo's DSi will prove to be driving market forces in Japan throughout the 2008 holiday season," he said. The UK market is gearing up for its best-ever fourth quarter performance.

In a panel discussion Tuesday at the HD3 conference in Century City, industry figures with a stake in the Blu-ray Disc format raised concerns over how the economy will hit the Blu-ray format over the holidays. Now that the format war is over and a lot of money has been put into promoting Blu-ray through retailers, the format's backers had hoped for a strong performance this holiday season.

"The economy is the biggest challenge, because there are just so many pieces to the Blu-ray puzzle that consumers face," said Lori MacPherson, GM of domestic home-entertainment at Disney. "You need the high-definition television set, you need the player, you need the cables, you need the software..." MacPherson still believes Disney's seasonal slew of new releases and catalog titles in the Blu-ray format will help move consumers towards the format.

"The economy is hitting everybody," said Danny Kaye, executive vp research and tech strategy at Fox. "But we still look forward to a great fourth quarter." There is good news on the horizon however for high-definition video equipment. "I know the economy is tough right now, but the manufacturers are really bringing down the price of their HDTV sets," Paramount vp marketing Chris Saito said.

Warner Bros. has pulled its DVD marketing and distribution operation in South Korea and is handing over the business to a local licensee. The move seems to be in response to rampant Internet piracy in South Korea where 94 percent of homes have high-speed broadband connections. The company made the announcement in a statement on Tuesday.

The company said it would make the transition in the coming weeks. This news comes just two months after Warner announced it would provide pre-release low-cost movie rentals on the Internet up to two weeks before they are released on DVD. The VOD service is meant to compete with piracy.

The company said its commitment to the South Korean market remains as strong as ever. However, it's latest move shows the struggle Hollywood studios have in countries like South Korea. An industry source said that the rampant piracy "creates a more challenging marketplace" than in other countries.

Circuit City Stores, Inc. announced on Monday that it had received approval for its first day motions from the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Richmond. The motions filed on the 10th by Circuit City as part of voluntary filing for reorganization relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code. Circuit City received court approval for a $1.1 billion debtor-in-possession ("DIP") revolving credit facility to supplement its working capital and provide additional liquidity while it works to reorganize the business.

This financing is being provided by the lenders of Circuit City's current asset-based credit facility and enables the company to pay vendors and other business partners in the ordinary course for goods and services received after the filing. Circuit City received authority to continue to make wage and salary payments and continue various benefits for
associates as well as honor customer programs, such as returns, exchanges and gift cards, and other pre-petition customer obligations.

"We are pleased to have obtained court approval for our first day motions, a critical first step in Circuit City's reorganization process," said James A. Marcum, vice chairman and acting president and chief executive officer of Circuit City Stores, Inc. "These approvals will help position us for a more successful holiday selling season and allow us to operate our business and serve our valued guests without interruption as we work to emerge from Chapter 11 as quickly as possible."

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Dell Inc. will not bring a mini MP3 player to the market this year tied to online entertainment software before the holidays. The company has reportedly been testing a prototype of a mini-MP3 player that is based on the company's Zing software. The MP3 player had been expected to show up sometime during the fall of 2008.

The Zing software is designed solely for entertainment content that is acquired over the Internet. It downloads and organized movie and music content. The Wall Street Journal cites a source familiar with the matter as saying the company has decided to hold off on releasing the music player indefinitely, but to continue to develop and push its Zing software project.

Is there anything you can't blame video games for? A recent trial saw a 19 year old sentenced for multiple sex attacks against women. The teenager from Ashford, Kent reportedly took to the streets drunk and stoned looking for women. In one case he broke the arm of a woman in her 40s by dragging her down a hill before sexually assaulting her. In a search of his home, police found a video game that they evidently thought was significant enough to note.

It was, of course, one of the Grand Theft Auto series of games. Remembering that the teenager was reportedly drunk and high at the times of the two attacks that he admitted, the Prosecutor, Eleanor Laws (yes, the Prosecutor!) noted that the amount of time the defendant spent playing the game "may go some way to explaining his attitude towards women."

Perhaps the prosecutor should consider another line of work where her opinion is professional and not intended to make an excuse for a sex offender as she did, in fact, weigh in on a debate that is unresolved by experts who actually study it. He is also 19 years old, this is not a case of a minor being exposed to a game rated for an adult. He is an adult. Or maybe I am wrong, and the Prosecutor only intended it as personal opinion.

Metro-Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) Studios will reportedly provide full-length feature files and TV content on Google's YouTube video sharing service. It was reported early last week that YouTube was preparing to add this type of content after spending months mending its relationship with Hollywood studios. On Sunday, news circulated that MGM will be the first studio (and most likely not the last) to add full-length content to the popular video site.

YouTube currently has a deal with Lionsgate, but it only stretches to short clips from films and TV shows. The deal, if the reports are accurate, signals a turning point for YouTube since it has largely been a headache for Hollywood studios since it first launched. After Google acquired YouTube, it refused to take responsibility for copyright infringing content posted by its users, citing the DMCA itself as protection.

Since then, it has made moves to remove pirated video content from its site at the convenience of the content owner. The reason for the change of heart is suspected to be Hulu, a video service already loaded with premium content that reportedly makes as much ad revenue as YouTube with only a fraction of the users. YouTube might have the numbers of users and reputation to compete, but it had to smooth over its relationship with the content companies first.

Chinese Internet censorship is hardly something new, but lately it seems the country has targeted BitTorrent sites. Last week, users in China reported that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, Pirate Bay and isoHunt were redirecting to Chinese search site Baidu.com. China recently started to ban 10 video sharing sites for "regulations violations" and the eDonkey indexing site VeryCD received warnings shortly before being re-directed to Baidu.com.

The domain hijacks continued for a few days until they were seemingly lifted. Official explanation for the outage is a "DNS error", yet that is very improbable as it seemed to affect the P2P sites exclusively which are hosted all across the world. DNS errors wouldn't explain why they were all linked to another (the same) site either.

Of course, its far more likely that the block was intentional. The only question is whether it was because of piracy or because of some content that could be gotten from any of the sites was specifically targeted by the government.

U.S. Researchers informed an American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans about the possible interference that MP3 player headphones might post to cardiac equipment. Pacemakers and implantable defibrillators' normal operation can be changed when in close proximity to headphones used with MP3 player equipment. Previously it has been found that MP3 players themselves don't interfere with cardiac equipment.

The reason the headphones have been found to cause disturbance with the equipment is the strong little magnets inside. When placed within 1.2 inches of the cardiac equipment, it was found to cause interference in about a quarter of tested patents. Fourteen out of sixty experienced problems when tested, with interference being twice as likely with defibrillators than pacemakers.

A pacemaker changes the speed of cardiac rhythm using electric impulses. The headphones in close proximity however could make it deliver a signal no matter what the heart rate is, possibly leading to palpitations or arrhythmia. An implantable cardioverter defibrillator signals the heart to normalize a rhythm whenever it gets fast or slow. The magnetic disturbance could make it ignore an abnormal heart rhythm.

BitTorrent Inc. has had a rough year. The company looking to make revenue from Bram Cohen's file sharing software is just another company struggling in today's turbulent economic climate. The company announced on Firday that it cut about half of its staff, and replaced its CEO Doug Walker. The company already experienced a 22% layoff back in August this year.

Eric Klinker, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) has been named as Walker's replacement. He has "two decades of networking, content delivery, and management experience." Walker had left Alias Systems just last year to take up the CEO position at BitTorrent.

"Klinker has...been instrumental to the continued development of the BitTorrent client, BitTorrent's Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA) content delivery service, BitTorrent's Software Development Kit (SDK) and BitTorrent's proprietary advanced congestion control technology. The latter has been at the center of BitTorrent's influential discussions and well-publicized collaboration with Comcast Corporation, as it seeks to deploy a protocol-agnostic network management solution." A BitTorrent statement read.

J.D. Power and Associates has conducted research in customer satisfaction of the most popular Smartphone models. Apple Inc. has ranked highest among the smartphone makers compared to Samsung and Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM). One in four of the smartphone users reported experiencing some kind of software problem. Seemingly, devices akin to small computers are also prone to the same problems as normal computers.

"These are mini-computers, and people do experience computer-like problems on these devices," said Kirk Parsons, senior director of wireless services at J.D. Power and the author of the survey results. "They have entirely different problems than a traditional cell phone."

The smartphones tested were rated out of a 1,000-point satisfaction scale. The iPhone scored 778 / 1000 primarily because users rated the smart phone highly in four of the five areas measured. "The iPhone's claim to fame is in the physical design area," said Parsons. "The appearance of the phone, the visual aspects, the weight and size of the phone, the size of the display screen. But it got very high scores in others areas, like ease of operation."

Suppliers of Liquid-crystal Display (LCD) components have witnessed a decline in sales during October. The decrease is what was expected with an industry-wide downturn which has forced panel makers to cut back productions. After consolidated sales of NT$3.38 billion (US$102.9 million) in September this year, backlight unit (BLU) maker Radiant Opto-Electronics reported a 10% drop in October and a 13.66% on year to NT$3.01 billion.

Radiant did report that its LED BLU shipments to the notebook/netbook segment grew sequentially in October, with LED BLU shipments to large-size notebooks reaching 463,000 units last month. The figure is up from 351,000 units in September. Shipments to medium-size netbooks grew slightly from 687,000 in September to 690,000 in October.

Wah Hong Industrial, an Optical film supplier reported an 17.26% rise in consolidated sales to NT$617 million back in September, and then suffered a decline of 15.7% in consolidated revenues to NT$520 million in October. Wellypower Optronics, a cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) maker announced that its October consolidated revenues fell 16.5% sequentially and 43.1% on year to NT$423 million.

In yet another example of how successful video games are becoming, the Epic title Gears of War 2 reportedly sold 2.1 million copies in its first day. VG Chartz gained early access to the sales figures of the game, which sold 1.4 million in its first day in the United States alone.

It's November 7th release puts another blockbuster on the shelves alongside the Xbox 360 console for the holiday season. Later this month Microsoft will push out a system update for the Xbox 360 that will completely change the user-interface of the console.

As impressive as the sales may be so far, last year's release of Halo 3 generated 3.8 millions sales in its first day. Providing key content at the right times during the year is vital to the success of Microsoft's console.

This year's game line-up for all three consoles is sure to generate an interesting battle between them again this year.

The combination of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio, Sirius-XM, will begin merging channels next week. The new company has 19 million paying subscribers currently, and despite an economic downturn, it is expecting growth. A drop off in car sales is somewhat threatening to its future business prospects however. While the company is being quiet about the exact details of programming change, many stations from the previous companies are expected to be merged if they provide similar content.

There will also be new subscription offerings for each system, with XM subscribers getting Sirius content like Howard Stern and the NFL for an extra $4 per month. All existing XM radios will get the Best of Sirius package, whereas only the recently-released Sirius Starmate 5 will be able to get the Best of XM package.

The Starmate 5 will get a la carte options as well, with users able to pick their 50 - 100 favorite stations for a lower monthly fee.

Two researchers plan to provide details at next week's PacSec 2008 conference in Tokyo on how Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is vulnerable to attack. Of course, this does not mean that WPA is as vulnerable to compromise in the same way that Wired-Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is, far from it in fact. The weakness in WPA is being reported by Martin Beck and Erik Tews, two graduate students in Germany. The attack could make it possible to compromise certain communications in less than 15 minutes.

The researchers found the weakness in the lesser of two WPA security protocol, Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). Attackers can use the techniques to decrypt limited communications and can recover a special integrity checksum and send up to seven custom packets to clients on the network, according to SecurityFocus.

"The new attack on WPA is not a complete key recovery attack," Tews said in an email to SecurityFocus. "It just allows you to decrypt packets and inject packets with custom content. But there is only a single short-term key recovered during the attack."

More details of the attack:
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11537

The infamous BitTorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay, is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. The site announced that is has reached 22 million peers this week, an increase of 10 million peers since April this year. Earlier this year, the tracker had set itself a goal of reaching 20 million peers and recently smashed that figure in much less time than was expected.

The site currently is host to over 3 million registered members and is evidently used by multiple times that figure. The site has survived attempts to shut it down from all angles, but its users have never suffered any major inconveniences or outages from those efforts. The site ridicules legal threats and other notices from legal reps of content companies and publishes them for all to see, and has had no problem standing up government pressure.

The site maintains that it is, and always has been operating legally since it does not offer any illegal content whatsoever to its users.

Panasonic presented the complete new 11-series product family of plasma televisions on Monday. The models come in 42-, 50-, 58- to 65-inch sizes support up to Full HD (1080p) High-definition video content. All are equipped with 18-bit signal processing equipment. The new TH-42PH11EK/ES has a resolution of 1,024 x 768 at 42-inch in size. Also immediately available is the TH-50PH11EK/ES 50-inch with a resolution of 1,366 x 768. Both sport 1,400cd/m2 brightness and a 15,000:1 contrast ratio.

JVC has offered up a new product for anyone who is looking to go out of their way to make their home theater system a little bit different. The company has unveiled its first (and claims the world's first) home 3D projector, built for use specifically with home theater systems. The JVC DLA-RS2 model is intended for people who like an illusion of multi-dimensional movies without the need for those infamous glasses.

JVC uses D-ILA projection and stereoscopic video processing to provide the 3D effect from "compatible content" without the need for the specialized glasses. The projector can produce Full HD (1080p) content and uses second-generation SENSIO 3D technology. It is noted as managing an image contrast ratio of 30000:1.

Obviously "3D content" is required for this projector to be any way special, but of course it will also look great when connected to your DVD-Video, Blu-ray, console etc. hardware. It will debut sometime in 2009 and currently has no price details.

Panasonic received the Hollywood Post Alliance Engineering Excellence Award for its development of the AVC-Intra 100 video codec yesterday, at the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) Awards gala in Los Angeles. The codec can achieve compression ratios good enough to encode full resolution, 10-bit independent (intra) frame HD video at up to 100 Mbps. The codec allows users to capture master-quality video with exceptional color depth and higher encoding efficiency.

"Panasonic is pleased that our peers at the HPA have acknowledged the accomplishments of our AVC-Intra development team," said Michael Bergeron, Chief Technologist at Panasonic Broadcast. "For some time, our customers and technology partners have been asking for a 10-bit, full raster, intra-frame HD codec, capable of operating in field acquisition equipment as well as in desktop hardware and software."

Warner Bros. is attempting to curb piracy of its products in China by offering a legal alternative to the country's 1.3 billion population. In co-operation with a Beijing-based media company called Voole, Warner Bros. will offer new titles from its vaults as digital rentals for a significantly reduced price compared to the street pirates. Bootlegged disks typically go for (GBP)£1 or less on the street.

Warner's plan is to offer the digital alternative rental service at a price of around 30p - 70p per download (based on the movie in question, one could only assume). The level of pirate products sold in China is in the area of 90%, but Warner and other concerned content companies cannot ignore the fact that China has one of the world's fastest growing economies.

Of course, the downloads will be protected by DRM, and the users will be able to download them and watch them from their computer or stream them over the Internet. Warner recently announced a similar plan to curb growing piracy in Korea.

Panasonic Corp. has announced that it intends to acquire its Japanese rival Sanyo Electric Co. in a move that would create Japan's largest electronics maker. The acquisition has an estimated price tag around $8.8 billion, a price Panasonic would pay to gain competitiveness in rechargeable battery production and solar power technology. Panasonic, the world's largest plasma TV maker, is sitting on $10 billion in cash.

The deal has many problems to be solved however. Panasonic needs to figure out what to do about Sanyo's loss-generating divisions which include microchips and home appliances. "Strategically (the deal) makes sense, though it doesn't necessarily make sense for Panasonic to take on every single bit of Sanyo Electric," said Hannah Cunliffe, fund manager at Germany's Union Investment, which holds Panasonic shares. "There has to be some relatively aggressive restructuring."

Due to the demand for rechargeable batteries for mobile phones, notebooks, portable media players and even cars, Panasonic would like to capture Sanyo's leading position with the technology. Additionally, Sanyo is the world's seventh largest manufacturer of solar cells. "Adverse business conditions are making it difficult for us to achieve the kind of growth we have been striving for," Panasonic President Fumio Ohtsubo told a news conference. "We need a new growth engine within our group."

According to Gamasutra, Microsoft's Xbox 360 currently has a higher attach rate (tie rate, attachment rate etc.) than the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles. This metric measures, on average, the number of games sold per console. It's obviously flawed for several reasons, for example because it means a boost in hardware sales could mean a lower tie rate for a period of time (and a boost in hardware sales is hardly a bad thing?)

Nevertheless, it is used in the industry as a measure of a console's performance in the market overall. More interesting than the overall tie rate is the difference specifically in the sales of first and third-party games. Nintendo, for example, is expected to have a higher tie rate for 1st party games compared to the Xbox 360 and PS3.

Research firm Strategy Analytics reported on Friday that Samsung has become the largest mobile phone vendor in the United States based on third quarter results. Despite global economic woes, the mobile phone market in the United States actually grew 6.2% from the same quarter of 2007, adding up to 47.4 million handsets in the quarter. South Korean consumer electronics vendor Samsung nabbed the largest share of the market at 22.4%.

Following Samsung (but still behind Motorola) was its rival also from South Korea, LG Electronics, which commanded an impressive 20.5% share of the U.S. market during the third quarter. In the previous year, Motorola had the top spot in the market with a 32.7% share, which fell dramatically to 21.1% in the same period of this year.

Motorola has warned that its fourth quarter results will also miss expectations, and that its mobile phone business will continue to weaken during the first half of 2009. Nokia took 8.4% of the U.S. market during the quarter which was up from levels seen earlier this year. Regardless, Nokia sells more handsets than Samsung, Motorola and LG Electronics combined globally, with a staggering 38% global market share.

Pioneer has introduced its new LX01BD Blu-ray Disc home cinema system, complimenting the HD video of Blu-ray with "exclusive audio technologies". Sporting a distinctive and compact three-dimensional speaker design, it is ideal for Pioneer's line up of Full HD Kuro televisions. The LX01BD incorporates a profile 1.1, BonusView Blu-ray Disc player that opens up a wide range of high definition entertainment options.

To provide lifelike motion picture, it provides HDMI Deep Colour support, which enables a wide range of colour tones and smooth transitions. The LX01BD has an integrated 5.1 channel amplifier and comes with compact dodecahedron technology derived satellite speakers that generate sound fields in all directions.

According to research by retail experts, video games will prove to be Britain's number one form of entertainment in 2008, beating music and other video products for the first time. Verdict Research predicts the video games market will grow by £1.37 billion ($2.19 billion), about 42% in 2008. The figure outstrips music and video sales which were expected to stagnate anyway.

The entire video games market in the UK is valued at about £4.64 billion ($7.42 billion), compared to music and video at £4.46 billion ($7.13 billion). "The music and video market is not just suffering from a slowing of growth but a massive transfer of spend to online," said the report's author Malcolm Pinkerton. "So in actual fact, the sales via high street shops are being hit a lot harder than the overall growth figures would suggest."

The report claimed that the music market gained revenue from sales of digital downloads but was hurt by growing piracy, price deflation and a decline in physical CD sales. "Games represent a relatively cheap, but also exciting and innovative pastime," said Matthew Piner, author of the Video Games and Consoles Retailing report. "As more people save money by staying in, a video game, although it may cost three of four times as much as a DVD or CD, offers much more longevity and hence better value for money."

Norway's Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon is keeping his pledge to put more pressure on Apple to cut the DRM tie between its iPod models and music downloads from the iTunes download store. The consumer mediator gave Apple a November 3rd deadline back in September this year, and now that the deadline has passed without Apple making enough effort (in the Ombudsman's opinion), it may face being brought before a government agency.

"iTunes has shown a lacking will to comply with our demand and we are now preparing to try this case in the Market Council," Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon said in a statement. Back in 2006, Norway was among the world's first countries to take issue with Apple's FairPlay DRM, which while protecting music, also created a tie between hardware made by Apple and digital downloads it sells.

SanDisk Corp. has announced a new flash memory management system that it claims will significantly boost performance from Solid-State Drives (SSD). ExtremeFSS will boost the speed of writing common types of data by 100 times, said Don Barnetson, senior director of marketing at SanDisk. The system will allow data to be written to the drive without erasing and rewriting nearby data. The ExtremeFSS system will also boost the longevity of SSDs.

Currently available SSD drives are marketed as having significant advantages over mechanical spinning hard drives; they produce less heat, use less power and would seemingly be less prone to failure. However, in reality they were found to under-perform compared to standard mechanical HDDs when they were first widely used in notebooks.

They tend to be slower at writing small amounts of data to the memory, while performing quite well with large files. This isn't very convenient for excessive use. In addition to announcing ExtremeFSS, SanDisk also pushed for the industry to adopt a few helpful metrics. Long-term Data Endurance (LDE) for example would be a measure of the amount of data that could be written to an SSD before it fails.

Uruguayan Customs officials worked with Apdif Uruguay (local industry anti-piracy group) in an investigation which led to the seizure of hundreds of thousands of pirated music and movie products. Officials discovered a smuggling ring that imports CDs from Uruguay to sell in the pirate markets of Brazil. The smugglers sourced blank discs from the free port of Montevideo and used the duty free shops as distribution points.

This allowed the pirates to evade import duties on both sides of the border and increase their profits by at least 50%. Apdif Uruguay and Uruguayan Customs officials raided the shops during October. The raids led to the seizure of a shipment of 750,000 blank DVD-Rs which had left Montevideo without proper documentation about its destination and content.

A further raid, carried out in conjunction with the Brazilian authorities, in the city of Santana do Livramento across the border, led to the seizure of 257,000 blank CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. The blank discs were destined for the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in a touring bus belonging to the musical Brazilian group "Toque Fandangueiro". Documents seized along with the cargo indicated that these discs allegedly originated in Miami.

We have updated several guides that deal with the multimedia capabilities of Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii consoles. The updates include guides for streaming content through a network to Xbox 360 or Wii, creating MP4 files for Xbox 360 or PS3, creating AVCHD for PS3 & Blu-ray players and using online TV sharing programs with Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii console.

Here are the updates...

Stream multimedia to Xbox 360 with TVersity:
https://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/stream_video_xbox_360_tversity.cfm