DownloadSoftFree

11 Oct 2008 21:16:37 GMT

Sony has confirmed that it will be giving Japanese PSP users direct access to the PlayStation Store via the handheld's built-in Wi-Fi connection. Beginning on October 15th, users will be able to use the store to purchase and download any game that would normally only be available on UMD from that point forward. The downloads will have faster loading times and get rid of the need to carry around the physical UMD. There will also be add-ons and in-game items available from the store for current games as well as future games. No word was given on whether users could download movies or music but the company did promise "more network services" for the handheld by the end of 2008. There was no word on European or North American launches but it is safe to say we will see the update at some point.

11 Oct 2008 21:45:47 GMT

TF is reporting that Romanian ISP UPC Romania subscribers headed to the large Romanian torrent site Torrentbits.ro will have blocked access, another setback for the site which has been trying to come back since it was raided by the police last year. The new move by the ISP mirrors that of the more famous case involving the The Pirate Bay in which all Italian ISPs blocked the site at the pressuring of the IFPI. The Pirate Bay successfully won an appeal in court however and is now unblocked in the country. UPC Romania has over 1 million subscribers currently and users had been reporting problems accessing the site for days. Users from other ISPs receive this message on the frontage however, addressing the problem.

11 Oct 2008 21:59:46 GMT

According to the EFF, the recent Hollywood suit against RealDVD is nothing more than a smokescreen aimed not at piracy but instead at stifling innovation. "It has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with controlling innovation," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF's senior attorney. The suit contends that RealNetwork's RealDVD software is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as a breach of contract with the DVD Copy Control Association. RealNetworks claims that the software "allows consumers to securely store, manage and play their DVDs on their computers" and "does not enable users to distribute copies of their DVDs." It also mentions that RealDVD adds another layer of DRM to the ripped movies which makes it much harder to move to films off the computer that has the program installed. The MPAA however told a judge that users simply need to start a Netflix account and they will build up huge movie libraries while paying only a monthly fee for the rental service. This "rent, copy, return" scenario would (clearly) cost the movie studios billions per year, noted the MPAA. Von Lohmann also adds however that there are a plethora of "DVD rippers" currently available online that allow users to copy DVDs to their hard drives, and those software have no DRM, unlike RealDVD. "Hollywood can't possibly believe that the $30, DRM-hobbled RealDVD software represents a piracy threat," von Lohmann wrote. "The studios are using the lawsuit to send a message about what happens to those who innovate without permission in a post-DMCA world." Any licensing agreement tech companies sign before making movie players are simply a means of control for the studios, added von Lohmann. "The licenses define what the devices can and can't do thereby protecting Hollywood business models from disruptive innovation," he said. "In the course of these years-long negotiations, Hollywood has managed to wrest several important concessions from technology vendors," von Lohmann wrote. These "include requiring that computers do watermark detection to spot pirated copies when reading data from Blu-ray discs, and imposing DRM on resulting copies." RealDVD is such a huge threat to the studios because it does not require a license, thus keeping Hollywood at bay. "By reading the existing CSS license carefully," von Lohmann wrote, "Real found a way to create a new product category without first getting permission from the Hollywood studios." Von Lohmann concludes that he believes the studios aren't against the backing up of DVDs, just that they want a cut of the revenue of any such product.

11 Oct 2008 22:19:27 GMT

According to a new study by Ipsos' TEMPO Digital Music Brandscape, despite the emergence of Amazon, Apple's iTunes platform still managed to gain market share in the increasingly crowded legal net music store crowd. iTunes moved to 57 percent market share, up from 50 percent last year at this time, and Amazon's DRM-free store moved into second place with 9 percent share, a large number considering the store has not been open for even a year yet. Rhapsody, which recently turned DRM-free, jumped up in market share as well, from 4 percent last year to 7 percent now. Each continues to expand and is expected to take more market share, but at whose expense? It appears everyone but iTunes. Other stores such as Napster, Yahoo Music and Walmart have taken a hit in market share, at the expense of the now clear leaders. Can anyone overtake the DRM giant that is iTunes though?

11 Oct 2008 17:45:25 GMT

A Federal Communications Commission engineering report released late Friday essentially backs a plan to open up wireless spectrum to create a free wireless Internet service by dismissing concerns about interference for existing providers.

11 Oct 2008 16:13:38 GMT

The bailout won't help Apple's AppStore and Google's Marketplace sidestep cash-strapped developers and penny-pinching consumers.

11 Oct 2008 21:38:47 GMT

On the show floor at BlizzCon today, I caught up with a few ?StarCraft? fans and asked them what they thought of yesterday?s announcement that the game would be split up into a trilogy.

11 Oct 2008 09:31:00 GMT

Nasa is pushing ahead with plans to launch its next Mars mission in 2009, but acknowledges that extra funds are required to make it happen.

11 Oct 2008 14:43:05 GMT

By Jacqui Cheng | Published: October 11, 2008 - 09:30AM CT This week's most-read Apple news was all over the map, but in a good way.

11 Oct 2008 01:53:05 GMT

By Tom Magrino, GameSpot Lead designer Jay Wilson opens up about his team's game creation philosophy, with more information to arrive "in the coming months...and years." ANAHEIM, California--Diablo III was the topic of one of the first sessions on the ...

11 Oct 2008 02:44:51 GMT

bsk_cw writes "Sprint's newly launched Xohm service is now offering America's first WiMax network. Computerworld's Brian Nadel went to Baltimore to try it out, and he reports that Xohm delivered data smoothly to a car moving at highway speeds, ...

11 Oct 2008 05:24:58 GMT

The first time it happened, scientists thought it might be a fluke. A female hammerhead shark residing at a zoo in Omaha, Neb., had not been in contact with male sharks for at least three years and yet experienced a "virgin birth.

11 Oct 2008 04:52:43 GMT

By SETH SCHIESEL Designing a successful massively multiplayer online game may be one of the supreme challenges in all entertainment.

11 Oct 2008 04:47:06 GMT

By Kim Hart A report released yesterday by the Federal Communications Commission concluded that using empty airwaves to provide free wireless Internet would not cause major interference with other services, paving the way for FCC Chairman Kevin J.

11 Oct 2008 03:20:33 GMT

By KENNETH CHANG Despite another overrun that could push its cost to more than $2 billion, NASA?s next-generation Mars rover mission remains on track for launching next fall, NASA officials said Friday.

11 Oct 2008 02:37:30 GMT

By JESSE MCKINLEY SAN FRANCISCO - After decades of debate, and unknown numbers of lost lives, the board that controls the Golden Gate Bridge took a major step toward building a suicide barrier on Friday, voting to erect a net under the span.

11 Oct 2008 06:05:53 GMT

Douglas Prasher, a resident of Huntsville, Ala., works as a courtesy shuttle operator at a car dealership. In 1992, Prasher voluntarily gave samples of his research to two of the three winners of this year?s chemistry prize.

11 Oct 2008 01:40:19 GMT

By DON CLARK Apple Inc. became the latest computer maker to disclose that some of its laptop computers may be affected by a flaw associated with Nvidia Corp.

11 Oct 2008 03:35:07 GMT

Has anyone else noticed a disturbing trend in the console war, specifically between PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 loyalists? I own both consoles, most people I know own both consoles, and if you're not familiar with the PSX Extreme readership, ...

11 Oct 2008 04:09:54 GMT

By SAUL HANSELL Verizon Wireless this week told companies that send out text messages that starting Nov. 1 it will impose a fee of 3 cents for each message it delivers to the phones of its subscribers.

11 Oct 2008 05:37:37 GMT

By MARK CARREAU DMITRY LOVETSKY AP An Austin space tourist will blast off early Sunday with an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a voyage to the international space station.

11 Oct 2008 03:43:18 GMT

By BRIAN STELTER After months of experimenting with long-form video, YouTube said on Friday it would start offering full-length episodes of some television shows on its sprawling Web site.

10 Oct 2008 14:46:18 GMT

Some of the tweaks that arrived with the launch of Gmail Labs are fairly silly (Mail Goggles and Old Snakey spring to mind), but a new option that arrived Thursday makes it increasingly apparent that Google is doing something right with the e-mail ...

10 Oct 2008 16:21:45 GMT

Zoho made some significant changes to a core part of its cloud-based application suite Friday: its online mail application now works offline and with Apple's iPhone, and the beta test is now publicly available.

10 Oct 2008 21:56:14 GMT

Wal-Mart's original plans would have made its DRM-protected tracks difficult to play on a PC, unless the music was first burned to a CD.

10 Oct 2008 17:32:54 GMT

Following an outlook about weak chip industry capital spending from market researcher Gartner on Wednesday, iSuppli cut its 2008 IC revenue forecast to 3.5 percent from 4 percent on Thursday.

10 Oct 2008 15:04:09 GMT

By Ben Kuchera | Published: October 10, 2008 - 10:01AM CT Going into this holiday season, it's clear that Nintendo will sell as many systems as it can get on store shelves, but the fight for second place is where the real action will be found.

10 Oct 2008 20:31:12 GMT

Last month we reported that Wal-Mart was shutting down its MP3 DRM servers, effectively killing off any music you have purchased from the retailer, unless you burn the music to CD and then rip it back DRM-free. It appears the giant retailer has done an about face after public backlash and will keep the servers running at "the present time," according to Ravi Jariwala, a Walmart.com spokesman. The decision follows that of both Yahoo and MSN who decided to shut down their servers and reversed the decision after public backlash. "(Walmart.com) will continue to evaluate options and no decisions have been made at this point. In the meantime, we'll continue to offer MP3 downloads through our online music store and will assist with DRM issues for protected Windows Media Audio (WMA) files purchased from Walmart.com," added Jariwala.

10 Oct 2008 22:54:05 GMT

After first being announced at CES 2007, Sling Media has finally announced the availability of the SlingCatcher playback device, 18 months after its initial unveiling. The SlingCatcher, according to Cnet is a "playback device that's designed to pull digital content from three sources and display them on your TV. It can play a variety of digital video files from an attached USB storage device (anything from a thumbdrive to a hard drive); display anything on your PC screen (including full-motion video) via the SlingProjector "screen scraping" software; and stream video from any source connected to a Slingbox (elsewhere in the house in high-resolution, or from a remote Slingbox source over the Internet at lesser quality)." The SlingCatcher, especially with its $300 USD price tag, may seem like a niche product for the time being, but it stands to gain momentum when a few more features are upgraded. Sling Media's has already introduced Sling.com which it calls a "premium library of movies, TV shows, and Web videos" which already has content deals with NBC, Fox, CBS, Showtime, Break.com, National Geographic, and MGM. Dave Zatz, a former Sling employee adds "SlingCatcher will eventually tap directly into Sling.com for some web video, perhaps partially taking the PC out of the mix." Good to see it finally on the market.

10 Oct 2008 08:01:00 EST

Desktops, Laptops, We've seen some big names working on 32nm chips, and now we can add two more to the mix. According to Nikkei, Panasonic and Renesas have recently developed technology necessary to mass produce the little guys, using metal oxide film (instead of a silicon material) for the insulating layer and titanium nitride for the conducting layer. This has allowed the chips to consume less power, so the 32nm chips operate comparably to their 45nm siblings. Look for a street date sometime in 2011 -- but considering that Toshiba, IBM and others have set a target date of 2010 for their 32nm chips, and Samsung and Intel are aiming at 2009, Panny might be showing up to this party a little late.

10 Oct 2008 17:27:00 EST

Desktops, Really, eMachines? You're honestly going to give your newest cheap-o PC this kind of tagline? Truth be told, we're not exactly sure what a standard sized dictionary even looks like (there's this thing called the internet...), but apparently, it's exactly the same size as the EL1200 desktop. Not sassy enough to be called a nettop, this here mini-tower is 40% smaller and 55% lighter than the company's second tiniest rig, and while it won't handle the likes of Crysis, it shouldn't have too many issues surfing the web and opening Word documents. As for specs, we've got a 1.5GHz AMD Athlon 2650e 64-bit CPU, NVIDIA's GeForce 6150SE integrated graphics, 1GB of DDR2, 160GB hard drive, a dual-layer DVD burner, 14-in-1 multicard reader, seven USB 2.0 ports and a $298 (MSRP) price tag. That system we just rattled off is available now at Wally World, while a slightly more stacked edition can be had at Best Buy for $349.

10 Oct 2008 22:44:00 EST

Desktops, With all these nettops, netbooks and plain ole motherboards flying every which-away, it's hard to say if Portwell's Atom-based nano-ITX board really is the first, but it's close enough to count in our book. Utilizing all sorts of legerdemain and black magic, the engineers at Portwell were able to craft a Linux-friendly mobo that measures just 4.72- x 4.72- x 0.65-inches and supports Intel's Silverthorne Atom while including six USB 2.0 ports, embedded audio and a gigabit Ethernet jack. The Nano-8044 can be ordered in two flavors -- the Z530, which packs a 1.6GHz CPU, or the Z510, which clocks in at 1.1GHz. As you could likely guess, this one's aimed primarily at point-of-sale machines, digital signage devices and other commercial applications, and the sub-10-watt power draw should keep energy costs to a minimum. Oh, and it should totally play Doom in a pinch.[Via LinuxDevices]

10 Oct 2008 18:08:02 GMT

By Tom Magrino, GameSpot World of Warcraft maker delivers opening remarks on the first of two days of tournaments, panels, meetings at the Anaheim Convention Center.

10 Oct 2008 14:55:11 GMT

Oslo will be available as an add-on to Microsoft's Visual Studio development suite. It includes a new programming language, a visual modeling tool, and a repository for storing models in a database.

10 Oct 2008 19:03:33 GMT

GeoEye, the Dulles provider of satellite and aerial imagery, has been boasting that its latest eye in the sky is "the world's highest resolution and most accurate commercial imaging satellite.

10 Oct 2008 23:56:32 GMT

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews In what can only be described as another "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, faced with the option of thousands of disgruntled customers, Wal-Mart is informing them it's decided to leave its online DRM ...

10 Oct 2008 20:07:11 GMT

Onset Technology, which specializes in developing wireless enterprise products, has released a new software tool that gives IT departments the ability to scan, block or archive all wireless email communications sent over their enterprise networks.

10 Oct 2008 15:03:20 GMT

Yesterday afternoon, Apple managed to surprise and not surprise observers at the same time. It shocked just about nobody by announcing that, yes, it would have the new product announcement that the rumor mill had expected in the middle of this month.

10 Oct 2008 04:25:18 GMT

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists using DNA testing have confirmed the second-known instance of "virgin birth" in a shark -- a female Atlantic blacktip shark named Tidbit that produced a baby without a male shark.

10 Oct 2008 00:46:23 GMT

Parent company GeoEye posted the photos to its gallery page just four days after the satellite was launched into space. The photo was taken shortly after the satellite passed over the eastern seaboard of the US and displays the campus of Kutztown ...

10 Oct 2008 00:25:25 GMT

Analysts look for opportunities as credit crisis squeezes the deal pipeline for memory chip makers. HONG KONG -- A string of potential deals between memory chip makers underscores the desperate need to consolidate as the global financial crisis ...

10 Oct 2008 02:40:03 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) - Google Inc., the leader in online search and advertising, is muscling in on video game territory - though it won't exactly be in the form of a shoot 'em up game.

10 Oct 2008 02:34:27 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Online video leader YouTube has opened up its version of a home shopping network in its latest effort to wring more revenue from its massive audience and justify the $1.76 billion that Google Inc. paid for the site two years ago.

10 Oct 2008 02:40:53 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court appeared divided Wednesday over judges' authority to limit the Navy's use of sonar to protect whales.

10 Oct 2008 02:39:02 GMT

During their keynote address at the Tokyo Game Show, Microsoft announced it is redesigning the interface for its Xbox Live service.

10 Oct 2008 02:37:09 GMT

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - US and Japanese researchers are among the favorites to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but don't expect any recent discoveries to get the nod.

10 Oct 2008 04:00:27 GMT

By YUKARI IWATANI KANE and BEN CHARNY Apple Inc. next week is expected to unveil new laptop computers -- including a model that sets a new low price point for the company -- as it sets its sights on one of the fastest-growing categories in the business ...

9 Oct 2008 16:28:12 GMT

According to an Xbit Labs report, the popular Xbox 360 console will be getting an external Blu-ray disc drive, and "soon." The report says that Toshiba-Samsung Storage Technology Corp. has been contracted by Microsoft to begin manufacturing the drive and that it will sell for the cheap price of $100-150 USD, in an effort to stay competitive with the Sony PlayStation 3, which has a built-in Blu-ray drive. Of course this isn't the first time that we have heard of Xbox 360 Blu-ray rumors but it is the first since June. Microsoft did not comment on the report and has always maintained that their business model was geared towards digital downloads.

9 Oct 2008 17:33:05 GMT

Microsoft VP John Schappert has confirmed today at the Tokyo Game Show event that the Xbox 360 "New Xbox Experience (NXE)" dashboard revamp is coming on November 19th to 26 countries and in 19 languages. The NXE will completely transform the intrerface of your console but the biggest change is the move to cover flow-esque navigation, working the same way Vista's Aero task switcher does. From there you can cycle through various channels (avatars, demos, new movies, Netflix, etc) and it appears there will be an expansion of channels, from the current 5. NXE will certainly include Netflix support with the ability to stream over 15,000 movies, concerts and TV shows to your 360. You can also "stream the movie with up to seven other consoles in a 'party' you can also haul around the dashboard, in and out of movies or games." The NXE also adds Mii-like avatars where gamers can customize a character to look like them (or anyone else) including the face, hair, body and clothing and accessories. More notably, NXE will give you the ability to copy your retail purchased game to the hard drive, which slows down load times and also saves your drive's laser in the long run. NXE officially adds 16:10 plus 1440x900 and 1680x1050 widescreen VGA and HDMI support. Fans should applaud this as it will remove most black formatting bars and will offer high resolutions for VGA and HDMI users. The new interface update will also include a new channel called "Xbox Live Primetime" which is basically a party game (think GSN) channel for XBL members. All of your current content including themes will be backed up and moved over flawlessly, says Microsoft. GTA IV running off the HDD compared to DVD "Change my features" New Releases Latest Demos Gamer Picture

09 Oct 2008 06:02:00 EST

Desktops, LaptopsAMD's breakup into two separate companies is certain to have wide-ranging impact in the industry, and unsurprisingly, Intel's among the first to react -- it's warning that it has "serious questions about this transaction" as it relates to its patent cross-licensing agreement with AMD and that it'll "vigorously protect" its intellectual property rights. That's about as aggro a patent attorney can get without coming to your house and peeing on the lawn (or, uh, filing a lawsuit), so we'll see how this shakes out -- for its part, AMD says that it's taken the deal into account, and that it'll "continue respecting Intel's intellectual property rights, just as we expect them to respect ours." That's a respect throwdown, right there -- you gonna take that, Intel?