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Written by Irfan
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Grand Theft Auto IV sold a record 609,000 copies on its first day of release, generating an estimated £24.4 million at the tills — nearly double the box-office takings of a blockbuster film.
The higher-than-expected UK sales figure, compiled by Chart-Track, eclipsed the record of 501,000 held by the previous instalment in the Grand Theft Auto series, San Andreas, in October 2004.
It also comes hard on the heels of the success of Wii Fit, on the Nintendo console, which sold 240,000 in its first two days — more than the 200,000 that retailers had been predicting. Wii Fit is the sixth-best seller ever, generating £16.8 million at the tills.
Last weekend the highest-grossing film was Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which generated £2.1 million at the box office. Casino Royale and Pirates of the Carribbean: Dead Man’s Chest each generated just over £13 million on their opening weekends.
Read full story @ Times Online |
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Written by Irfan
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It seems that there are some serious bugs in GTA 4 and its affecting PS3 owners the most.
People mailed the INQ to report that their copies of GTA 4 on PS3 cannot be installed to the hard-drive on their consoles, even after a factory reset and reformat of the device. Other users have reported crashes after successfully installing the game.
Similar tales have popped up on the official Playstation forums, Digital Spy, GTA Forums, AVS Forums, and many more.
To begin with, users believed that only 60GB-launch consoles were suffering from the problems but, since these first systems reported errors, non-launch 60GB and 20GB console users have also reported problems. PS3 Forums has started a poll showing that it isn't restricted to one type of SKU here.
Someone on the Playstation forums contacted Sony support and received this answer: "The Rockstar tech guy said that they are looking at the image that was sent out for the PS3 disc and they'll post onto the official Rockstar forums when a fix comes up, which he said would hopefully be soon."
Another reported that the Canadian support offices were being plagued by callers: "A friendly English bloke claims he was getting hammered with issues, and he is leaving work in 25 minutes."
There is currently no official response from Rockstar.
Read full story @ Inquirer |
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Written by Irfan
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Nvidia has tacitly confirmed speculation about the specifications of its upcoming GeForce 9600 GSO graphics card by launching the thing.
As expected, the GSO connects to 384MB of graphics memory over a 192-bit bus. The Ram runs at 800MHz, the GPU itself at 550MHz, though the chip's 96 unified shaders are clocked at 1375MHz.
That, said, Nvidia yields a texture fill rate of 26.4bn polygons per second. The memory bandwidth is 38.4GB/s.
Those numbers put the GSO at the bottom of the GeForce 9 list, though it offers all the key features of its stablemates: support for SLI, HD disc decoding, PCI Express 2.0 and DirectX 10.
The GSO comes in ahead of the ATI Radeon HD 3830, AMD's bid to undercut the GeForce 9600 GT.
News Source : channelregister.co.uk |
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Written by Irfan
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Windows XP could yet be reprieved from end-of-life, if enough customers demand it, said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today.
Speaking at a news conference in Belgium Ballmer said: "XP will hit an end-of-life. We have announced one. If customer feedback varies we can always wake up smarter but right now we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments", reports Reuters.
But at the same time he insisted that consumers were switching to Vista in numbers, which is perhaps to be expected, as the majority of new computers available at retail now come loaded with the operating system.
As for the business world, Ballmer noted: "We still have customers who are buying PCs with XP". He explained that many IT departments were still supporting dusty old kit that cannot handle memory-chugging Vista.
Earlier this month Microsoft confirmed it would continue to sell Windows XP Home edition licenses beyond the operating system’s scheduled 30 June kill-date for bargain basement PCs only.
Meanwhile, Microsoft finally got the long-awaited XP SP3 out of the door on Monday.
Read full story @ theregister.co.uk |
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Written by Irfan
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PayPal is seriously considering blocking some browsers from accessing its site, according to a paper (PDF) available to shareholders.
Titled "A Practical Approach to Managing Phishing," the paper admits that there's no one silver bullet to prevent fraudsters from making money on the Internet. However, authors Michael Barrett, PayPal's chief information security officer, and Dan Levy, the company's senior director of risk management for Europe, say companies could and should start addressing five specific areas:
- Prevent fraudulent e-mail from getting into users' in-boxes
- Prevent phishing sites by shutting them down
- Authenticate users so that stolen credentials can't be used on PayPal
- Prosecute fraudsters to the full extent of the law
- Focus on brand and consumer recovery
Of these, the paper focuses mainly on e-mail prevention and phishing-site blocking. For e-mail prevention, the authors cite Yahoo Mail as an example and point to its use of domain keys to identify legitimate and illegitimate mail marked as coming from PayPal.
Most controversial is the idea of blocking "unsafe" browsers, or browsers that do not currently include antiphishing tools. PayPal says it would first notify users when they log in if they are using an unsafe browser. Later, PayPal would simply block the use of the browser entirely.
Read full article @ news.com |
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Written by Irfan
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Microsoft has admitted it is investigating reports that a recent Windows Vista security update causes havoc with some USB devices, but the software giant is yet to provide a fix for the cock-up.
The Windows Vista SP1 pre-requisite KB938371 update was released last week, but some unfortunate Vista customers have claimed that their USB mice and keyboards among other devices refuse to work after the update is installed on their computers.
One reader told The Register that he gave up after several frustrating attempts to remove the erroneous update.
The company said in a statement today:
“We are aware of concerns that a recent Microsoft update may be causing problems with USB devices. We are investigating the matter, and at this time, do not have any information to share.”
Yesterday, meanwhile, Microsoft finally pumped out Vista service pack one (SP1) in the remaining 31 languages available as a manual download via its Windows Update site.
However, the automatic version of the download remains missing in action. Redmond had chalked mid-April as the date when SP1 would start downloading onto computers across the world.
Now Microsoft has been forced to admit that it has once again missed a crucial service pack deadline.
Read full article @ Channelregister.co.uk |
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Written by Irfan
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Web designers making very old mistakes are letting malicious hackers hijack visitors to their sites, say experts.
Many of the loopholes left in the code created for websites have been known about for almost a decade say the security researchers.
The poor practices are proving very attractive to hi-tech criminals looking for a ready source of victims.
According to Symantec the number of sites vulnerable in this way almost doubled during the last half of 2007.
Wholly vulnerable
Kevin Hogan, director of security operations at Symantec, said the bug-ridden web code was putting visitors to many entirely innocent sites at risk.
"It overturns the whole notion that if you stay away from gambling and porn sites you are okay," he said.
The attack that a malicious hacker can carry out via these web code vulnerabilities is known as cross-site scripting (abbreviated as XSS).
Typically these involve lax control of the data being swapped between a web server and the browser program someone is using to interact with it.
An XSS vulnerability could, for instance, allow attackers to steal the login credentials of a visitor to a site.
Read full story @ BBC.CO.UK |
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Written by Irfan
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A group of hackers has brought the BBC's iPlayer service to the PS3, creating an unofficial portal where console users can access television content. The website is based on the flash streaming service from the Nintendo Wii version of iPlayer, which the BBC launched just last week.
The new site tricks the BBC's servers into believing that the PS3 console is actually a Wii.
"It's mainly a demonstration of how easily the BBC could support the PS3 with their Wii version. This does nothing more than mask your PS3's user-agent string and makes half a dozen changes to make the JavaScript and CSS function correctly on the PS3. It only took a day to produce, so come on BBC - how about implementing this properly?" asks a message on the unofficial PS3 iPlayer portal
Last week the BBC announced that iPlayer would be officially available on the Nintendo Wii, but that no such plans were underway for either the Xbox 360 or Sony PS3 because Sony and Microsoft desired too much control over the service.
Read full article @ PcPro.co.uk |
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