The game, which goes on sale on 19 June, will be available in Europe only on PlayStation.

But it is thought gamers could get round this exclusivity by buying the US 360 versions online, through so-called “grey imports”.

The Xbox 360 European release is scheduled “later in the year”.

Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 have been battling for a larger stake in the console market.

Both firms have tried to tie down exclusive game deals to give their hardware a marketing edge.

But the number of exclusive titles has fallen in recent years and the ability to buy a rival format online has further eroded the two companies’ ability to lock down exclusives.

Sony Europe declined to comment, but a spokesman said it “wasn’t the first time a 360 title had been released region free”.

Cross the streams

PlayStation 3, PSP and Nintendo DS titles are usually region free, meaning they can be played on any console in the world. The exception to this is the Nintendo Wii; titles can be played only on a console from the same region.

Retailers are worried that the ability to buy a format online – but not in the shops – could damage sales.

The associate editor of games industry journal MCV, Tim Ingham, told the BBC retailers would be banking on consumers waiting for the European 360 release.

“They will be hoping these gamers wont be savvy – or bothered – to order from the US,” he said.

“In a way they are lucky, because the Ghostbusters franchise will appeal to more casual gamers, rather than the hardcore.

“Had this been a Final Fantasy or Halo game then people would have been online ordering it in spades.”

It is thought some retailers might buy stock from the United States and then sell direct to European customers in what is known as “grey importing”.

Although legal, the practice is discouraged by European publishers as it means they are excluded from the buying process.

“It’s unlikely firms will resort to grey importing as it would damage their relationship with publishers,” said Mr Ingham.

And he’s right.

The updated “The Taking of Pelham 123″ is a riveting movie about a subway dispatcher confronted by a former Wall Street trader seeking revenge — not just a ransom, as in the 1974 film — from the city of New York for sending him to prison.

The movie opens nationwide Friday.

It’s essentially a two-character play, with much of the dialogue delivered over a two-way radio between Washington, in the train control center, and Travolta, on a hijacked train, director Tony Scott said.

The drama is paced and punctuated by a dramatic above-ground sequence, including plenty of crashes, as police rush to deliver a $10 million cash ransom before a deadline.

Travolta’s character is “a contradiction of what you normally expect in a bad guy,” Scott said. “He’s funny, he’s smart, and he’s got a big heart.”

While Travolta, who is mourning the loss of his teenage son earlier this year, did not participate in interviews, he issued a written statement that called his character “the ultimate evil mastermind.”

“This role as an actor gave me the chance to dispense with all moral and ethical limitations, and explore just how bad this character could really be,” Travolta said.

Washington said his character, a transit official demoted to dispatcher because he was suspected of taking a bribe, is a new twist on the familiar hostage negotiator role.

“I was concerned a little bit about ‘Inside Man’ where I was a cop and a hostage negotiator,” he said. “I just liked the idea when they hand him a gun that he’d never held one before, that he was an ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation and with this cloud over his head. He didn’t come to work knowing he was going to get an opportunity to redeem himself.”

Washington, who looks younger and more fit than his character, said to prepare for the role he “ate a lot and kept getting smaller and smaller sweaters to wear.”

New York City is also a major character, Scott said.

Many scenes were shot below ground in subway tunnels and a closed down transit station in lower Manhattan, mostly at night, Scott said. It took four weeks of tedious shooting, he said.

“It’s just a whole other world down there,” said Washington.

An old train car was rebuilt to accommodate cameras and placed on a sound stage in Queens for scenes that couldn’t be shot underground, Scott said.

The same person who designed the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) high-tech control center was hired to build a replica on a sound stage in Queens, he said.

Brian Helgeland, who wrote the screenplay, revealed the secret about why he would use an older movie title for a film they do not want seen as a remake.

Since Sony Pictures already owned the rights to “The Taking of Pelham 123,” it made it an easier sell to the studio, he said. The original film, whose title had the number spelled out — “One Two Three” — was based on a best-selling 1973 novel by John Godey, and starred Robert Shaw as the villain opposite Matthau.

“The start was using that as a title, something the studio would feel comfortable making rather than just a nameless, orphan idea that you might have on your own, to try to put that together and use ‘Pelham’ as a springboard to make your own crime movie,” Helgeland said.

He tried to stay away from the original “Pelham” particulars “but we had the same situation as the core, which was a hostage situation with one guy in the train with the hostages and another guy outside dealing with him over the radio.”

Putting the movie together, he said, was “a little bit like trying to pull off a heist, putting the pieces together, with a getaway car driver and a safecracker and all that stuff.”

Alan Duke
http://edition.cnn.com

The Justice Department has sent the requests, called civil investigative demands, to various parties, including Google, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild and individual publishers, said Michael J. Boni, a partner at Boni & Zack, who represented the Authors Guild in negotiations with Google.

“They are asking for a lot of information,” Mr. Boni said. “It signals that they are serious about the antitrust implications of the settlement.”

The Justice Department began its inquiry into the sweeping $125 million settlement this year after various parties complained that it would give Google exclusive rights to profit from millions of orphan books. Orphans are books still protected by copyrights, but that are out of print and whose authors or rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

Attorneys general in several states are also investigating the settlement.

The complex settlement agreement, which is subject to review by a federal court, was aimed at resolving a class action filed in 2005 by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google. The suit claimed that Google’s practice of scanning copyrighted books from major academic and research libraries for use in its Book Search service violated copyrights.

Under the settlement, announced in October, Google would have the right to display the books online and to profit from them by selling access to individual titles and by selling subscriptions to its entire collection to libraries and other institutions. Revenue would be shared among Google, authors and publishers.

Critics said that the settlement would unfairly grant Google a monopoly over the commercialization of millions of books.

The Justice Department’s requests do not necessarily mean that the government will oppose the settlement. But the department’s investigation could delay any approval of the settlement, antitrust specialists said.

“The government must be a lot further along with this than people thought,” said Gary Reback, a lawyer who wrote a book on antitrust. “Now, there is a big boulder sitting on the judge’s desk. It is hard to see the judge approving this if a government investigation is pending.”

Judge Denny Chin of Federal District Court in Manhattan, who is overseeing the settlement, is to hold a hearing in September.

The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site Tuesday that some publishers had received civil investigative demands.

By MIGUEL HELFT

http://www.nytimes.com

That spectrum leads to another reason: cash. That older, analog spectrum was auctioned off by the government and went for nearly $20 billion.

On Jan. 26 the Senate passed a bill that would have postponed the switch to DTV to June, which was then defeated in the House. On Feb. 4, the House voted again to extend the transition to digital television by four months until June 12. President Obama signed the legislation that pushed back the deadline and allowed some stations to turn off their analog signals earlier.

The main question everyone has about the DTV transition is: What do I need to do about it? This part is simple: If you have cable or satellite, you don’t have to do anything. If you get your TV signal from an antenna, you have to buy a digital converter box in order to continue to watch television. You only need the box, and possibly a new antenna – older antennas may not pick up UHF signals, which is what DTV uses. You do not need a new television, or a high-definition television (HDTV).

So, how does one get a converter box? This is slightly less simple. Converters are sold at many locations: online, at big-box retailers, possibly your local drug store. They cost $50 to $70. You have to buy separate converters for each TV you own.

So you may be wondering why you have to shell out $50 or more to upgrade your TV when you didn’t ask for this conversion in the first place. That’s why the government set up a voucher plan. The idea was that people who needed a converter could get up to two vouchers (one per converter), each valued at $40. That would make converter purchases nearly cost-free, or at least pretty inexpensive.

Then things got complicated. Originally, the vouchers had a 90-day expiration date and all had been sent out, and no money remained to fund any more. But on March 24, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced that the backlog for digital television converter box coupon requests had been cleared and that the government now had sufficient financing to send out more.

The F.C.C. said more than 4,000 people were available to answer the agency’s phone number, 1-888-CALLFCC (1-888-225-5322), to help consumers who are confused about the switch.

http://topics.nytimes.com/

Firefox 3.5 Preview will be offered to the 800,000-plus users of FireFox 3.5 Beta, with Mozilla looking for developer testing and community feedback. Although not a release candidate, the preview is considered stable enough for daily browsing use, Mozilla said. Testing has not been completed to the point where the software could be declared a release candidate.

[ Also, Mozilla is looking to personalize the Web with its Jetpack project for browser add-ons. ]

But a release candidate is due soon, with general availability expected later this summer. Previously, the company had anticipated a release candidate for the first week of June and general availability later this month. A Mozilla representative said the company is driven by quality rather than a timeline.

Firefox 3.5 features such highlights as video capabilities and support for private browsing, in which Web site visits are not recorded or saved to disk, said Vlad Vukicevic, tech lead for the Firefox project at Mozilla. But speed improvements are paramount, he stressed.

“The main significance [of the browser upgrade] is that Firefox 3.5 is really, really fast,” Vukicevic said.

JavaScript performance is boosted via the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

Other features of Firefox 3.5 include HTML 5-based capabilities for audio and video, offline caching, and the HTML drag-and-drop API for moving items within and between Web sites. CSS enhancements, including downloadable fonts, also are featured.

The preview offers video and audio capabilities based on the Ogg format.

http://tech.yahoo.com

GamersGate is a digital distribution platform — a way to help gamers find games they want, buy them and download them — that’s already being used by PC gamers. The company counts more than 1,100 titles in its library (the vast majority of which are, of course, for PC gamers). It’s signed on companies like Ubisoft, EA, THQ and others.

The initial launch of the GamersGate store for Mac users includes the independently developed and published game World of Goo, along with titles created for the Mac by Virtual Programming, such as the Hearts of Iron strategy game series, Europa Universalis, FlatOut 2, and others. The company plans to add new titles on a regular basis.

By joining TransGaming’s GameTree Network, GamersGate will also gain access to titles TransGaming offers. TransGaming publishes Mac versions of games from EA, such as The Sims 3, Spore and others.

By Peter Cohen
http://tech.yahoo.com/

It sounds odd, but the European Commission’s solution to the problem caused by Microsoft bundling its Internet Explorer browser into the Windows OS appears to be more, rather than less, bundling.

If IE is in the OS on its own, it has an unfair advantage over rival browsers such as Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari because people are generally averse to downloading software if they don’t absolutely need to and make do with what’s already on their desktops.

So, put all of those rival browsers, and perhaps the numerous morphed open-source versions of them as well, into Windows and bingo, the playing field is level. That seems to be the logic applied by the Commission, Europe’s top antitrust regulator, as it prepares to slap Microsoft with another humiliating antitrust ruling, expected later this year.

A list of browsers should be presented on a ballot screen that would be installed onto PCs together with the Windows OS. This would allow users to decide which browser they want.

But it’s not that simple, as the Commission is about to find out. At the end of this week it receives responses to a questionnaire it distributed among PC makers and software firms, asking for advice on how to craft the remedy to the browser market problem. Two very different answers based around the creation of the ballot screen are emerging from the replies being drafted.

The first involves picking the five most popular browsers and preloading them so that they are installed with Windows. The selected browsers would appear next to each other in a horizontal line on the ballot screen, which would pop up around the time the user first attempts to access the Internet. The user would then be prompted to choose a default browser.

The other alternative is to have an all inclusive list of all available browsers on the market. A typical browser uses around 6MB of memory. If there are, say, 15 browsers out there that means well over a gigabyte of memory, most of which is wasted because the user will never need all the browsers.

The idea being considered is to put links to all the browsers on the ballot page rather than to preload them all. The links would allow a user to download the browser of their choosing from the Internet.

The advantage of this remedy is that the Commission wouldn’t be put in the position of having to choose between rival browsers.

But it raises an obvious problem: How do users gain Internet access to download a browser if they don’t already have a browser to connect them in the first place?

One idea is to allow browser makers to compete to have their software preinstalled on PC manufacturers’ desktop and laptop computers. But this favors the wealthiest players in the market: Microsoft and Google, which would be able to outbid all others with ease.

Some lawyers fear that if the Commission chooses this option and Google secured this privileged position for its Chrome browser it would simply replace a Microsoft monopoly with a Microsoft-Google duopoly, which in the long term would be equally harmful to consumers.

“If the remedy the Commission chooses results in the real estate on the PC for one or other browser being for sale, then there’s a problem for everyone apart from the highest bidder,” said Thomas Vinje, a lawyer representing Opera, the Norwegian browser company that sparked the Commission’s antitrust case with a complaint to the regulator in December 2007.

However, Google insists it isn’t interested in buying market share for Chrome, which remains the smallest and youngest of the big five browsers.

People familiar with Google’s thinking say the company is more concerned about speed of access to the Internet. They point out that all the main rivals to IE are faster than Microsoft’s browser, so any alternative to IE would be acceptable.

A faster browser would allow more searches within a given period of time, which would mean more advertising revenue for Google’s search engine.

“For Google, the browser is simply a delivery mechanism,” said one person close to the company who asked not to be named. “It doesn’t like having to rely on its arch rival Microsoft’s IE browser in order to distribute its search and other internet services,” he added.

In its response to the Commission’s questionnaire about the shape of the remedy, Google is understood to favor the preloaded option, involving a short list of the most popular browsers being preinstalled and flagged on the ballot screen.

Google is understood to have even proposed that Chrome be excluded from the ballot screen list to make way for the fastest growing browser at any given time. Google declined to comment.

Microsoft did not receive the questionnaire about antitrust remedies, for obvious reasons. However, it has said in the past that it bitterly opposes the ballot screen remedy, which amounts to a “must carry” order forcing it to install rival browsers with Windows.

CompTIA, a trade group ally of Microsoft’s that represents many small European PC manufacturers and assemblers did receive the questionnaire. In its reply to the Commission, the group said that a must-carry remedy imposes financial, technical and administrative burdens on its members, forcing them to alter their business models, which are built around a fully equipped Windows OS with built-in IE.

It also argues that consumers don’t want the must-carry remedy either. “We believe that many consumers will not like the multiple browser feature that is under consideration — they will find it confusing, unnecessary and complicated,” CompTIA said in a recent statement.

The statement was issued on behalf of 90 small PC manufacturers, including bluechip Computer of Germany, PC Peripherals of Ireland and Bionic Electronics HT of Cyprus. None of the commonly known original equipment manufacturers were included.

Microsoft declined to comment on a possible antitrust remedy against it. However, it has urged PC manufacturers, including CompTIA’s members, to share their concerns with the Commission about the must-carry idea and the notion of a ballot screen featuring a choice of browsers.

The Commission also refused to comment. But one person close to the antitrust team handling the case said the questionnaire feedback will play an important role in helping shape the final remedy, assuming they do push ahead with a negative ruling as expected in the fall.

Vinje said the efficacy of any remedy will be determined by how it is designed.

He added that one of the most crucial questions is when, during the process of connecting a new PC to the Internet, the consumer is prompted to select a browser. The sooner the ballot screen appears the better, he said.

Paul Meller, IDG News Service

http://www.pcworld.com/

Produced: Lori Forte, John Donkin
Directed: Carlos Saldanha
Written by: Michael Berg, Peter Ackerman
Cast: Ray Romano, Queen Latifah, Denis Leary, John Leguizamo, Seann William Scott, Josh Peck, Simon Pegg, Chris Wedge

Everyone must have gone through the same feeling of cuddling Manny and his friends in Ice Age’s previous preludes of ‘Ice Age: The Meltdown’ and ‘Ice Age 2: The Meltdown’. So get ready to go through the same experience as all of them are going to rock the screen with their new sequel ‘Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ on July 1, 2009.

This Fox Production release will have the same characters with the plot moving smoothly to its next stage where Manny (Ray Romano), Sid (John Leguizamo), Diego (Denis Leary), Ellie (Queen Latifah), Eddie (Josh Peck), Crash (Seann William Scott) and Scrat (Chris Wedge) get to know more about the dinosaur population on Earth that has survived extinction. As usual, Crash and Eddie are up to their funny antics, while Manny and Ellie are enjoying their lovey-dovey romantic life getting ready to have their first baby. After seeing Manny and Ellie’s happy family life even Sid wants to start a one his own and in a fit of jealously steals dinosaur eggs. He is captured by the dinosaurs with his herd trying to save him. While all these adventure roller coasters are not enough, a one-eyed dinosaur named Buck (Simon Pegg) pops up in the middle. We will also get to witness a budding romance between Scrat and his new found love; Scratte. A complete full on entertainment with a perfect voice over casting and animations are a guarantee to a blockbuster.

http://filmreview.com

Russell is 8 years old and trying to earn the last badge he needs to reach the next level in his Wilderness Explorer group. Russell comes with his own baggage and the two form an unlikely bond. Setting out on an adventure to fulfill his wife’s dream, Russell and Carl travel to South America in Carl’s house carried by helium-filled balloons.
A giant, bird of unknown species named Kevin and a dog named Dug are engaging characters that help Russell and Carl learn the importance of friends and relationships. Both learn the value of letting go of the past and making room in your heart for something or someone new.
The animation is once again breathtaking as Pixar shows it’s skill in making the unbelievable believable. The movie has heart by the buckets full and only the most jaded viewer will not shed a tear or two or cheer loudly at its conclusion.

http://filmreview.com

Every new computer in China will have the software installed

China has defended the use of new screening software that has to be installed on all computers.

Foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said the software would filter out pornographic or violent material.

Critics have complained that it could also be used to stop Chinese internet users searching for politically sensitive information.

But Mr Qin, speaking at a regular press briefing, said China promoted the healthy development of the internet.

All computers sold in China – even those that are imported – will have to be pre-installed with the “Green Dam Youth Escort” software.

‘Poisoned minds’

The news came in a directive from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the new regulations will come into force on 1 July.

The directive says the newest version of the software has to be pre-installed on Chinese-made computers before they leave the factory.

Imported computers must contain the software before they are sold.

The aim is to build a healthy and harmonious online environment that does not poison young people’s minds, according to the directive.

Mr Qin defended the move on Tuesday: “The purpose of this is to effectively manage harmful material for the public and prevent it from being spread,” he said.

“The Chinese government pushes forward the healthy development of the internet. But it lawfully manages the internet,” he added.

The Chinese government regularly restricts access to certain internet sites and information it deems sensitive.

The BBC’s Chinese language website and video sharing website Youtube are currently inaccessible in Beijing.

Critics fear this new software could be used by the government to enhance its internet censorship system, known as the Great Firewall of China.

But a spokesman for one of the companies that developed the software, Jinhui Computer System Engineering, rejected this accusation.

“It’s a sheer commercial activity, having nothing to do with the government,” Zhang Chenmin, the company’s general manager, told the state-approved Global Times newspaper.

By Michael Bristow
BBC News, Beijing

http://news.bbc.co.uk