MS to double Xbox 360 shipments

Microsoft plans to boost shipments of its Xbox 360 video game console by "two to three times" this week to address shortages that have crimped game sales across the industry, reports Reuters.

The increase comes a week after rival Sony announced it would delay the launch of its PlayStation 3 game machine until November to finalise standards for the Blue-Ray disc drive.

Microsoft said it can ramp up Xbox 360 shipments now that its supply of components is in full production and a third contract manufacturer, Celestica, is making consoles along with Wistron and Flextronics International.

France`s lower house of Parliament has passed a law that could challenge Apple`s dominance of the online digital music market by making it open its iTunes store to portable music players other than its iPods, reports Reuters UK.

French officials said the law aimed at preventing any single media playing operating system, Apple`s iTunes or Microsoft`s Windows Media Player, from building a grip on the digital online music retail market.

The new legislation will require that online music retailers such as iTunes provide the software codes that protect copyrighted material to allow the conversion from one format to another.

South Korea`s Samsung has begun offering a 32GB NAND flash-based, solid-state disk (SSD) for mobile computing applications, says InformationWeek.

Samsung also sells hard disk drives, but is now aggressively developing NAND-based solid-state storage devices as a potential replacement for traditional storage, especially in MP3 players like Apple`s iPod. Apple is using NAND-based solid-state storage in some iPods and hard drives in other models.

Now, Samsung is expanding its flash storage efforts into notebook PCs and related markets, which puts the company in further competition against the disk-drive makers. The company`s new product, dubbed the 32GB Flash-SSD, is said to serve the same purpose as a hard disk drive for notebooks and other mobile computers, according to Samsung.

Red Hat debuted its Fedora Core 5 version of Linux this week, giving users new graphics and virtualisation abilities, as well as some desktop utilities based on a software framework from Microsoft, reports CNET News.

Fedora is a proving ground for features later incorporated into the premium Red Hat Enterprise Linux product. Version 5 has numerous new features, with both of Linux`s major graphical user interface packages, GNOME and KDE, updated to versions 2.14 and 3.5 respectively, as well as 3D effects for the user interface.