With an eye on the upcoming holiday shopping season, Microsoft on Monday said it would bundle two video games with the Xbox 360 video game console.
By the end of the month, Xbox 360 and Xbox 360 Elite are expected to ship with Forza Motorsport 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. The games have a combined retail price of $90.
Microsoft in August lowered the price of the consoles by $50 in an effort to keep pace with similar moves by rival Sony, which sells the PlayStation 3. The 20 GB Xbox 360 now sells for $350. The 120 GB Elite system retails for $450.
The U.S. price cuts followed Sony’s decision in July to lower the 60 GB version of the PlayStation 3 to $499 from $599.
While hardware pricing is important, games are the driving force behind consumers’ choice of video game console.
Among the most popular games on the Xbox is Microsoft’s sci-fi game Halo 3, which posted sales of more than $300 million in its first week on the market.
Released September 25, first day sales of Halo reached $170 million, and retailers took more than 1.7 million pre-orders — both industry records.
Nintendo in June sold 381,800 Wii consoles, compared with Sony’s 98,500 PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s 198,400 Xbox 360 machines.
The holiday shopping season, which officially begins the Friday after Thanksgiving and runs to Christmas, is the biggest retail season of the year, and a time when Microsoft and its rivals make major marketing pushes for their consoles.
While the Zune might not really be the worst design ever, it somehow seems right to have the dung-colored box at number one, although maybe “number two” would have been more appropriate:
Somewhere along the way, though, Microsoft forgot to include the iPod’s sexy design, opting instead for a boxy plastic casing and a spectacularly unflattering brown color.
The new feature, previously available only through the Labs page, adds a new link to your Google Maps search results and shows you how to reach you destination via public transport.
Obviously the feature only works if your city happens to have decent public transportation and the routes have been added to Google’s index.
Driving directions are still the default view for search results in Google Maps.
To see what transit systems are included in Google Maps, take a look at the Google Labs page.
If you city isn’t currently part of Google’s listing, keep in mind that the company is always adding more transit systems.
In the past few weeks it has added San Francisco’s BART system, Santa Clara’s Valley Transportation Authority, and more. The public transport feature includes numerous listings in Japan.
The new public transport options on Google Maps include some nice features like adding time of day to see when trains are scheduled, and a price comparison between the cost of transit fares and the cost of driving.
You’ll also find links to the relevant public transit website (when available).
Linux’s biggest downside remains the lack of driver support for peripheral devices of all stripes, but there’s good news: a new project from Novell is offering to write free drivers for any manufacturer that’s willing to show their specs.
The project itself is not new, it was announced last year by the main developer, Greg Kroah-Hartman, a programmer at Novell.
However, late last week Kroah-Hartman posted an update to his blog and announced that Novell has moved him onto the project full-time.
I never imagined that so many different people would offer to help out. There is a real need for a place where developers can find a “real” project to work on in the Linux kernel.
The Kernel Janitors project is a great place to start out, but what to do from there? It turns out that over 100 different developers offered up their services.
Clearly this was a huge untapped group of talented people who wanted to help out.
This is great news for Linux fans and will hopefully mean much better device support for your favorite distribution.
Something to note, while Kroah-Hartman and crew are willing to sign NDAs for the actual device details the companies hand over, all of the code generated will be GPLv2 and can thus be rolled into the Linux kernel.
With an eye on the upcoming holiday shopping season, Microsoft on Monday said it would bundle two video games with the Xbox 360 video game console.
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