Wii Outselling PS3 in Japan 385
saintory writes "Apparently the Japanese console consumers are sinking their teeth into the modest Wii and are not as interested in the power-packed PS3. In fact, the Wii is outselling Sony's new console by a factor of almost 2:1. The number of PS3s sold into the Japanese market (466,716) falls well short of the million Sony had planned for the end of 2006. 989,118 Wii consoles have been sold in Japan in the same time span. From the article: 'Both Sony and Nintendo are projecting selling 6 million consoles by the end of March. Sony expects to start shipping the PS3 to Europe sometime that month as well. Straggling far behind Sony and Nintendo in the Enterbrain survey was Microsoft's Xbox 360, which had sold 290,467 since its Japan debut in December 2005. Selling machines in large numbers is crucial in the gaming business because it encourages software companies to make more games to play on the machines, which in turn boosts console sales.'"
YouTube's Content Identification Failure Raises Eyebrows 109
MSNBC is carrying a story looking at YouTube's failure to follow through with a promised 'content identification system' by the end of the year. The article goes on to discuss the possible impact this failure will have on the site's (so far) good relations with television, music, and movie studios. From the article: "If the delay lasts for more than a week or two into the new year, suggesting more than just a slight technical hitch, 'this is certainly going to be a serious issue', [Mike McGuire, a digital media analyst at Gartner] added. Leading music companies have already made clear they see completion of YouTube's anti-piracy technology as an important step in any closer co-operation. Failure to build adequate systems to protect copyright owners could also add to the risk of legal action against the site."
Submission + - VBulletin abuse of power?
Anthony Boyd writes: "A representative for the VBulletin software product has revoked the license from a site simply because he found the material objectionable. He initally claimed it was due to violation of law until people started quoting the law to him. Then he said they revoked the license because it violated some "morality" clause in the VBulletin license — but people looking at it are unable to find such a clause. What do you think? Was this capricious or reasonable? Is it justified in law? As a VBulletin customer, how secure do you feel about your license?"
Collada 79
Tony Parisi writes "Remi Arnaud and Mark C. Barnes' Collada: Sailing the Gulf of 3D Digital
Content Creation is a great first book on a new technology for entertainment
applications. Collada is a file format for the exchange of 3D game and interactive
content, developed by a consortium of companies including Sony and leading
digital content creation software vendors. Collada acts as an intermediate
format between DCC tools and end applications — thereby promising to solve
ages-old productivity issues in the 3D content pipeline. The authors have
done a thorough job explaining this problem, and how Collada solves it, in
an introductory book that is well suited for a technical audience building
advanced 3D tools and applications." Read the rest of Tony's review.
Debian Delayed by Disenchanted Developers 329
Torus Kas writes "Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 was supposed to be due by December 4 and development is currently frozen. Apparently the saga was triggered by disenchantment towards funding of $6,000 for each of the 2 release managers to work full-time in order to speed up the development. Many unpaid developers simply put off Debian work to work on something else."
Novell "Forking" OpenOffice.org 370
l2718 writes to mention that In the wake of their recent deal with Microsoft, Novell has announced a new version of OpenOffice.org which will support Microsoft's planned Office formal, Open XML. From the article: "The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell's OpenOffice.org product. Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. As a result, end users will be able to more easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites."
