Articles by Walaika Haskins

After a stellar month in September with the release of the much anticipated game "Halo 3," Microsoft passed the No. 1 console sales mantle back to Nintendo and its Wii console for October. Consumers scooped up 516,000 Wiis in October, about 30 percent more than the Xbox 360's 366,000 units and more than four times the number of PlayStation 3 consoles sold, according to figures released Thursday by NPD Group, a sales tracking firm...

Fountainhead Entertainment and Id Software, the developer behind the "Doom" and "Quake" video game series, have announced they have come together to create a new division at Id Software: Id Mobile. The software developer's new arm will create games for cell phones, the handheld Nintendo DS and Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) ...

Sun Microsystems and Dell have put aside their longstanding rivalry and teamed up to offer business customers Sun's Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris operating systems preloaded on Dell's PowerEdge servers The joint announcement Wednesday at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco follows a similar deal Sun inked with IBM back in August and a push ...

Microsoft will mark the fifth anniversary of its Xbox Live online gaming site Thursday, and to celebrate, it's offering members of the Xbox Live community a chance to download a free Xbox Live Arcade game. The console maker will also debut a new category of downloadable games, giving Xbox 360 owners a chance to travel back in time and experience some of the games that helped the original Xbox become a success...

IBM's Blue Gene/L System once again ranks as the fastest computer in the world, coming in at first place on the TOP500 Supercomputer Sites, an organization that ranks the world's most powerful systems. The results were announced Monday at the SC07 Conference, held in Reno, Nev Located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a Department of E...

Microsoft revealed specific details about its upcoming Windows Server 2008 Monday at this year's Microsoft TechEd IT Forum in Barcelona, Spain, including packaging, pricing and licensing information. One major difference from previous iterations of Windows Server, the software maker announced, are two sets of the operating system (OS). One set includes its new Hyper-V virtualization technology, formerly codenamed "Viridian;" the other does not...

Children in developing nations who receive the XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation can exercise their imaginations and build their own cities with the original "SimCity" video game Electronic Arts (EA) announced Thursday that it has donated the game, originally released in 1989, to the OLPC Foundation for the organization to i...

Microsoft announced a new tool to help parents limit the amount of time their children spend playing video games on the Xbox 360 Wednesday. With the Family Timer, parents can program an appropriate amount of gaming and entertainment time on the console for their children on a daily or weekly basis The announcement, made in conjunction with the Pare...

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has turned to graphic chip technology to boost the power of its latest high-end processor, the FireStream 9170 Stream Processor, unveiled Thursday The hybrid chip taps into the "massive parallel processing power" found in graphics processing units (GPU) and leverages it to meet the needs of the demanding high-performanc...

Lenovo unveiled its latest offering for business users Tuesday -- two new workstations. The ThinkStation desktop computers are a first for Lenovo. The No. 3 computer maker has focused primarily on sales of its ThinkPad laptops It is also the first time the Chinese hardware maker has added a new Think-branded PC to the line since it purchased IBM's ...

Instead of asking a stranger for directions, lost drivers may soon be able to turn to Google Maps for help as they fill up their gas tanks. Google has teamed with Gilbarco Veeder-Root, a commercial fueling supplier, to put Google Maps at the gas pump "Getting directions at the pump is safer than using Internet-enabled devices from the driver's seat...

It's been nearly a month since the British rock band Radiohead shook the music industry by releasing an entire album on its Web site and allowing fans to pay whatever they wanted, down to and including nothing, to download and own the music forever Now, the preliminary sales results are in, as tabulated by comScore....

The 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) hit the picket lines Monday after talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) failed to reach a compromise. At issue are new allocation plans for DVD and digital download residuals. It is the first strike since writers walked out in 1988 Writers are seeking a la...

As the Internet and digital technologies continue to play an ever-increasing role on the business side of the music industry, big-name recording artists have begun to turn their backs on their labels and opt instead to strike out on their own Part 1 of this two-part series describes what longstanding acts like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have don...

Microsoft and HP announced the availability of the HP MediaSmart Server running Windows Home Server. The new class of server enables consumers to protect, connect and share digital media and documents Aimed at consumers, the MediaSmart Server (MSS) is the flagship product in what Microsoft said is an entirely new category of consumer products....

Hackers were able to make their copies of the PlayStation Portable (PSP) and PlayStation 2 (PS2) versions of the game "Manhunt 2" even more violent less than one day after the game was released Oct. 31 The discovery could put Take-Two Interactive and its subsidiary Rockstar Games on the defensive once again, handling another round of bad press abou...

TV and movie writers in the Writers Guild of America (WGA) are expected to hit the picket lines as early as Monday after failing to reach agreements with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) The two factions are waging a pitched battle over DVD and digital distribution residuals, a growing profit center for media content ...

More and more data center managers have begun implementing virtualization and server consolidation strategies in an effort to cope with the growing complexities they face today, according to a Symantec report released Tuesday. The survey also found that data managers must confront a plethora of challenges due to "rapidly rising service level agreements (SLAs), staffing difficulties, increasing expenditures anddata center growth...

"Star Wars" fans got a lot to think about following the announcement Tuesday from LucasArts and BioWare that the two companies have teamed up on what they call an "interactive entertainment" product "LucasArts has a deep commitment to developing compelling stories and characters for the unique medium of interactive entertainment, and we have been s...

To mark its second birthday Monday, Meebo unveiled a surprise for its users -- applications for the Meebo platform. With the announcement, the instant messaging site joins social networks such as Facebook and MySpace that have opened up their platform to third-party developers. The first round of applications are designed to pep up Meebo's communications capabilities...