With bloggers all over the world exchanging recommendations and MP3 samples, MAP is getting new music to a broad global audience It was a weird day on 16 July 2009 for the Holy Roman Army, a tasteful, glitchy electronica duo from Carlow, Ireland. The brother and sister group are small-time, with just over 37,000 profile views on MySpace, 1,485 plays of their most popular song and two upcoming gig...
From those folks at CXO, a quick way of assessing whether your password actually stops bad people, er, passing Photo from Flickr. CC-BY licensed Those folks over at CXO have been playing with Google Mail's password strength meter. It turns out - as if you needed to be told - that simple dictionary words such as "princess" or well-known phrases such as "biteme" (yes, Bart Simpson, I'm t...
Neighbours were oblivious that recluse who froze to death in her home was first black woman on South Carolina legislature The neighbours knew Juanita Goggins only as an elderly recluse with no friends and a family that was rarely seen. Goggins was so private that she instructed a neighbour who delivered groceries to leave them at the door, ring the bell and go away before she emerged. She spur...
Reuters has published some social media guidelines in its handbook of journalism. Dean Wright, Reuters' global editor for ethics, innovation and news standards, announced the new guidelines yesterday. While the guidelines encourage Reuters journalists to use social media and stress that it is a powerful new tool, Reuters journalists are asked to get in contact with their line manager if they...
Many Catholic priests and religious have abused children in their care. But is the church's record worse than the world's? There seems to be no end to the scandals buffeting the Roman Catholic church about the abuse of children; most recently in Germany , where the headmaster a school associated with a choir once run by the pope's elder brother Georg Ratzinger has been exposed as an abuser. And ...
In what is predicted to be a pivotal year for ebooks, with next month's iPad launch, the number of books available as iPhone apps now exceeds the number of games The electronic book passed another milestone this month, with the number of books available on the iTunes App Store passing the number of games for the first time. According to data released earlier this month by the mobile phone advert...
Jesse Divnich of EEDAR recons this is just the beginning of a new industry power struggle... Last week began with two staff members allegedly being escorted from their development studio by burly security guards. It ended with a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the biggest games publisher in the world. And while gamers are frantically trying to work out what the Infinity Ward/Activision sa...
Iraq war film The Hurt Locker wins six awards including best picture and best original screenplay Kathryn Bigelow today became the first woman in history to win the best director award at the Oscars. Her low-budget Iraq war film, The Hurt Locker, about a bomb disposal team, was the big winner at the ceremony. It took six academy awards, including those for best picture and best original screen...
It's surprising that we haven't had a dedicated Twitter feed for our games coverage before. Well, now we do Let's be brief. You're a busy person. You can't be checking the @guardiantech Twitter feed all the time to see if there's a new games review or blog post up. No, you've got places to be, people to frag. So we've set up a dedicated Twitter account just for games coverage: @gdngames . It'...
New figures suggest Facebook's financials are healthier than expected - with the site on course to break a billion dollars of revenue by the end of the year Yes - and perhaps even more than that, according to new figures . New projections suggest that the company made as much as $635m in 2009 - around 15% higher than previously estimated - and could be on track to rise to around $1.1bn by the e...
Long-awaited 360 exclusive nears release Alan Wake was first announced in 2005. Four years on and the game is finally ready for launch. The long awaited Xbox 360 exclusive mixes Silent Hill, Twin Peaks and a stack of other literary and movie influences to create something that looks hugely promising. I'll post my hands-on thoughts later in the week but first up is a short interview I had with O...
PC; £29.99; cert 16 ; Creative Assembly/Sega With the PC in seemingly terminal decline as a games format, RTSs are just about the last of its native genres and Creative Assembly one of its most important developers. Luckily, there's no sign of that trust being misplaced with Napoleon, the latest instalment in the Total War series. Like its predecessor, Empires, this epic retelling of Napoleonic ...
Xbox 360/PS3/PC; £39.99; cert 16 ; DICE/EA Swedish developer DICE's Battlefield games may lack the glamorous image of rivals such as Call Of Duty, but they are hugely popular among the military first-person game cognoscenti. The Bad Company sub-franchise represents DICE's attempt to add a credible single-player experience to a primarily online series of games, and the second instalment arrives, ...
Story of his experience of the fatwa 'needs to be told' says author, as his archive goes on display in America Salman Rushdie is planning to write a book about the decade he spent in hiding after Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him. "It's my story, and at some point, it does need to be told. That point is getting closer, I think," he told reporters at Emory University...
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