MODDING: blogs

A shareholder group has proposed the ouster of the entire corporate board at Circuit City Stores Inc., the electronics retailer that has struggled to maintain market share.

Wattles Capital Management on Friday proposed a clean sweep at the nation's No. 2 consumer-electronics retailer just days after the group nominated five members for Circuit City's 12-member board.

Investor Mark J. Wattles, the group's principal and founder of the Hollywood Entertainment video-rental chain, has criticized Circuit City's restructuring and turnaround attempts.

Vodafone have confirmed, following initial reports that the Samsung i560 would be taken up for the UK as a Vodafone exclusive, that they “won’t be ranging this device. This device was tested with our new Sat Nav software and we
weren’t happy with its performance.” This was the only one of Samsung’s new S60 smartphones that we had a hope of seeing in the UK, although the i450 and i550 are available in Germany and Italy.

Great to see the Nokia N82 getting some professional TV coverage, here on G4 on their Gadget pr0n (sic) show. Despite the American focus(!), the presenters seemed to get the hang of the N82’s strengths - well worth a watch. (via Lonely Bob)

We've had ATI CrossFireX running the past couple days here at Legit Reviews and while the drivers are not public yet, things are looking very good from what we have seen. We have slapped together a Radeon HD 3870 X2 with a Radeon HD 3870, which in turn creates a Triple CrossFireX platform with just two x16 PCI Express slots. Read on to see what CrossFireX is all about!

The Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G.), the non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement and recognition of game audio, announced the winners for the 6th Annual G.A.N.G. Awards which honor outstanding creative, technical and artistic audio achievement in the world of interactive entertainment.

Voted and judged upon by the game audio industry and members of G.A.N.G., BioShock made its mark by taking home every category it was nominated in. BioShock composer Garry Schymann said “Every now and again life provides one of those great moments of satisfaction for which words are really inadequate to describe. Being honored by my friends and colleagues at this years G.A.N.G awards was one of those moments. It was a very moving evening for me and I will always be grateful to G.A.N.G. and everyone who considered my score for BioShock worthy of these honors. I get to look at the trophies everyday now and that is very humbling and amazing!”

U.S. and Canadian law enforcement authorities seized more than $78 million in counterfeit Cisco Systems network hardware during a continuing operation targeting illegal distribution of phony products made in China.

Code-named Operation Cisco Raider by the FBI, the effort intercepted tens of thousands of fake Cisco network components and labels, the U.S. Justice Department said Thursday. Some of the defective products were purchased by the Marine Corps, Air Force, the Federal Aviation Administration and even the FBI, according to court papers. “Counterfeit network hardware entering the marketplace raises significant public safety concerns and must be stopped,” Alice Fisher, chief of the Justice Department's criminal division, said in a statement.

Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it plans to cut prices of its Windows Vista operating system sold at retail outlets in a move aimed at pushing customers to switch to the newest version of Windows. The world's largest software maker said it plans to lower retail prices for Vista in 70 countries later this year in tandem with the shipment of the first major update to Vista, known as Service Pack 1 (SP1).

In the United States, Microsoft will reduce prices for Windows Vista Ultimate, the company's top-end operating system, to $319 from $399 for the full version and cut the price for an “upgrade” version to $219 from $259 for consumers who already run Windows XP or another edition of Vista. It also cut prices for upgrade versions of Vista Home Premium, its mainstream product, to $129 from $159. The price cuts vary by country.

Electronic Arts is not alone in its interest in buying Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. SEC filings show that Take-Two says it has received other offers, but has spurned those as well as the original $2 billion offer EA made last Friday and announced last Sunday, the Journal reports .

EA issued a public statement on Sunday saying that it had made an earlier offer to Take-Two that was rejected and that it was boosting the per-share price it was willing to pay to make the deal worth $2 billion. But Take-Two quickly issued its own announcement, saying it thought EA's offer was too small and that it would prefer to wait to have any negotiations with anyone until after the April 29 release of Grand Theft Auto IV, which is expected to be a hit.

Intel has set the pricing for its upcoming 4-series chipsets which are to be launching in the second quarter this year, while also adding one more member, the P43, to the lineup, according to sources at Taiwan-based motherboard makers.

The P43, a cut-down version of the P45 chipset, will not support dual x8 PCI Express slots as the P45 will offer, and will support DDR3 memory only up to 1066MHz compared to DDR3 1333 MHz for the P45, the sources indicated. However, the P43 will be available at US$34 in 1,000-unit tray quantities, lower than the US$40 quoted for the P45, said the sources. Intel also plans to launch an entry-level IGP chipset, the G41, in the first quarter of 2009 with pricing for this chip to be decided later, the sources noted.

Oxygen Software have been plugging away at their Phone Manager product for years, and they’ve just announced a major revamp, rebrand and relaunch. OxyCube is released yesterday and is compatible with a wide range of handsets and provides syncing and file browsing functions. (via SymbianOne)