Microsoft has been getting bad press recently, with the announcement of its plan to extend all malfunctioning XBOX 360’s warranty to three years; at a price of US$1 billion. Peter Moore, Vice President of the Entertainment & Devices Division of Microsoft, has written an open letter apologizing about the problem.

“If we have let any of you down in the experience you have had with your Xbox 360, we sincerely apologize. ” Moore wrote, “We are taking responsibility and are making these changes to ensure that every Xbox 360 owner continues to have a great experience.”

As well, Microsoft announced that it fell short of its target. It previously said that on June 30th, it would have shipped 12 million consoles, but managed to ship 11.6 million.

A brand new auction site is now selling exploits. WabiSabiLabi, run by WSLabs, will allow exploit finders to sell their findings to people. This is to stop the findings being sold to the virus code writers. CNET News.com has more information about this story…

DailyTech is reporting that on July 12th, the PS3 will drop its price to $499. This comes after the poor performance that PS3 has done in all markets, though it claims that it has won in Australia. It is expected that the announcement will come in it’s E3 press conference.

A German court has ruled that Google cannot use the name “Gmail” in Germany, upholding a claim by 33-year old Daniel Giersch’s e-mail service, called “G-mail”, that was launched 4 years before the search giant started “Gmail”.

Mr. Giersch’s lawyers have also said to the court that it has put them into a costly three-year marathon of lawsuits in Germany and also in Spain, Portugal and Switzerland.

Giersch has also said that he was not trying to extort the name for a princely sum from Google.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was named the best game by industry experts and readers of Edge magazine. In the top 10, Nintendo has claimed 5 positions; and only the PC and Xbox had 1 representative. As well, 5 games for the next generation consoles made it to the top 100.

Want your blog to be added on our blogroll, you can now have your chance to do so. Since I can’t be bothered doing the blogroll, you just need to comment on the blog post with the name of the site and the link. You will also need to link to our site.

So… comment away!

Yes, I have Pownce Invites! Yay…

Anyway, I got 6 invites to give out, so you better act fast. These are going like hotcakes in an oven. So good luck…

COMMENT NOW (WITH YOUR REAL E-MAIL ADDRESS, SPAMHOUS E-MAILS WILL BE IGNORED)

Update:
Here is the tech.geek Pownce account: http://pownce.com/techgeek/
Here is my personal Pownce account: http://pownce.com/buzzhellchild/

Add them to your Friends list…

Remember Joost, and now it decided to open its doors (sort of). Now, following in its footsteps is Pownce. Pownce is like some kind of clash between Twitter and other Web 2.0 services (I don’t know, I’m just guessing from the images and crap), and was started by none other than Kevin Rose, the guy from Digg.

Typing in “Pownce Invites” on Google brings up 290,000 results; most coming from Digg stories from Mashable, but also from smaller blogs (like this) who happened to score one. Now people are going desperate measures, with some even getting them for $2 on E-Bay (At the time of writing, there was 3).

Ironically, this is what happened on Joost’s invite system. People waiting for an invite and go online and get desperate. Well, not all of them. Due to the high demands, many people will only give them out to the 6 (from what I’m told) invitees if they promise to use their 6 invites to send them to other people on the list. At least it’s fair.

As well, Pownce has saw a couple of invites using the Spamhous e-mail service; which creates a ‘false’ e-mail address to cover your identity. They now have ignored any e-mail addresses with Spamhous.

Is it me, or is it just that every single Web 2.0 website in alpha, beta or whatever they call it are now using this invite system.

Adelaide based Hostworks, a web hosting company, has now said that it plans to revamp their server virtualisation software after resigning their biggest customer, ninemsn, for another 6 years. It currently provides both Microsoft and VMware virtualisation software; with most customers go to VMware and nineMSN using Microsoft, as ninemsn is 50% owned by Microsoft.

Meanwhile; Seek, a web-based job listing website, has now announced that it will outsource it’s hosting to Hostworks. It previously handled the website traffic, but says that Hostworks can do this more “effectively than us because they have the specialist skills, mature processes and infrastructure services” to ZDNet Australia.

Hours after release (I’m still not getting over the fact that it’s not coming to Australia until 2008 with a hefty price tag), the iPhone has been dissected by tech guru Anand Lal Shimpi.

The iPhone has the usual GSM and Wi-Fi antennas, battery, tape and camera. As well, it uses 2 PCB cards - each tightly packed with chips. It also equipped with the Samsung MLC NAND and an ARM processor. However, the ARM processor bears the Apple logo not the Samsung logo, who manufactured it.

The touch-screen consists of multiple layers, with the layer closest to the motherboard having faint dots in a grid like pattern.

However, Anand Lal Shimpi was not able to put the iPhone to function. He also warned not to do this as it may void your warranty. (Maybe get two iPhones if you plan to do this…)