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Jon Martindale

Xbox One not designed to stand vertically

Console orientation has been something the last generation experimented with, all of them – Wii, PS3, Xbox 360 – offering either vertical, or horizontal as a potential option. Each of them had feet on the ‘side,' but could be mounted either way. Likewise, the Wii U has a stand and …

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Sony not worried by loss making PS4 hardware

It's not uncommon for hardware makers in all sorts of tech areas to take a loss on the initial release. Sony did it with the PS3, Amazon did it with the Kindle Fire – it's a way to make sure you sell lots of the base kit, in the hope …

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Get a limited edition GTA made me do it TShirt

If like many of our readers, you found the latest round of bad press sent gaming (and specifically GTA's) way by the British tabloids, you might want to pick up this limited edition “GTA made me do it,” TShirt, currently available over at Teespring. “They say video games make us …

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Activision Blizzard sale put on hold

Activision Blizzard, one of the world's biggest game publishing companies, was set to buy itself out from parent company Vivendi, but that has now been stalled, due to a lawsuit from shareholder Douglas Hayes, which suggests that the sale could not be completed without unfairly enriching CEO of Activision Blizzard …

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Sony pledges to perma-ban persistent trolls

In-game and out-of-game trolls, are something that gaming has struggled to deal with for a long time, but particularly in recent years. With the advent of Twitter and other social interaction platforms, the lines of communication between developers and players and just between gamers themselves, have been shortened, making for …

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Nintendo’s longest running president has died

University drop out and former richest man in Japan, Hiroshi Yamauchi has died, ending the long life of a man who was also Nintendo's longest running president. Having taken on the role from his ailing grandfather in 1949 at the age of 22, Yamauchi ran the company until 2002, when …

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Kim Dotcom’s MEGA wins NZ award for privacy

Legally embattled Kim Dotcom, founder of Megaupload, worker on Baboom and one day possible political driving force, has announced that his cloud backup service MEGA, has won a prize for security and privacy in 2013, from the Australia and New Zealand Internet Awards. Known as the ANZIA, these prizes are …

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Blizzard set to shut down Diablo III auction houses

Diablo III was a big hit. It sold millions and millions of copies and remained a headline grabber for many sites and publications for quite some time. Unfortunately though, quite a few of those headlines revolved around gold hacks, or items being stolen from accounts – all of which stemmed …

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Vodafone lists UK iPhone 5s prices

Vodafone has announced its pricing plans for Apple's upcoming iPhone 5s smartphone ahead of its release in just three days time, along with potential upgrade options for those that haven't quite reached the end of their contract yet and still want to get in on the latest fruity fashion item. …

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German Pirate Party flies drone into election rally

In what must be seen as an attempt to draw attention to the local branch of the Pirate Party and to highlight problems with invasions of privacy, a German election rally for chancellor Angela Merkel, was interrupted when an unmanned drone was flown within metres of her campaign podium during …

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We still suck at predicting the sun’s activity

For all our technological advancements, our ability to communicate across vast distances instantaneously, our large hadron colliders, smartphones and our Mars rovers, we're still a bunch of head scratching apes when it comes to the awesome power of the sun. Despite our best predictions that our lone star should be …

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Sol solar powered Ubuntu laptop coming this year

While companies like Intel might be hammering away at improving the efficiency of components while maintaining performance, we're not quite at a stage yet where mobile electronics like laptops are able to sustain their operating life between charges much over 10 hours, if that. However, that doesn't matter so much …

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Grand Theft Auto helps little indie stores too

While often times with big franchises, you hear mostly about big chain stores or online retail giants benefiting the most from huge releases, the Grand Theft Auto franchise has a history of supporting the smaller companies and those same companies support Rockstar and its games in turn. With the release …

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OfCom study claims piracy isn’t a big deal

British broadcasting watchdog, OfCom, has conducted a study of piracy and online activity without interference from the media industry or its lobby groups and has found that piracy isn't perpetrated by large numbers of people and should be of little concern to the government or content producing companies. The research …

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Developers claim PS4 is 50 per cent faster than Xbox One

Uh oh Microsoft. Just when you were doing so well and regaining some ground after your horrible start to the Xbox One's PR run, Edge magazine goes and publishes something like this. Yes folks, according to a bunch of developers Edge has been speaking to, the PlayStation 4 runs most …

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Facebook completes real currency transition

Another nail has been put in the coffin of our future galaxy spanning civilisation using those space age sounding “credits,” to pay for everything. Facebook has completed its transition from using the non-localised currency back to real world money. While credits had its advantages, such as allowing Facebook users to …

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Batman: Arkham Origins PhysX demo

It's been a long time since people like me got excited by Ageia's new PhysX cards, with its tech demo games like Cell Factor, but that doesn't mean that the PhysX technology isn't still important. Granted now all you need is an Nvidia GPU, but if you're part of the …

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Voyager 1 makes it out of our solar system, god speed

Voyager 1 has done it. It's made it out of the solar system. From its humble beginnings in 1977, travelling through the vacuous chill of outer space, the humble space probe that was built when glam rock was still a popular phenomenon, has become the first man made object to …

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Forget Kinect, here’s a real next-gen motion controller

While the Wii's controllers and nunchuks might have introduced us to the idea of motion controlled gaming, it's only in recent years that we've really got to a level where it's beginning to be a useful and practical way of interacting with games. However, that development hasn't come from Microsoft's …

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Halo’s Cortana is Microsoft’s Siri alternative

If you've thought that Microsoft's Windows phone platform was lacking a voice activated search feature like Apple's Siri, then don't worry, it won't be like that for much longer, as Cortana, the AI chick from the Halo series is going to be your new digital companion. Cortana will spread herself …

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Microsoft buys Xbone.com domain, admits its not a fan

In an effort to corral any further hate against its upcoming Xbox One console into a more manageable state, Microsoft has purchased the Xbox One domain name, Xbone.com, for an undisclosed sum. At the same time, Major Nelson admitted that he's not a fan of the nickname. Not at all. …

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