Sad that your brand new Windows Phone doesn’t have much apps to fool around with? Well, today, Microsoft has announced that ad-supported versions of Minesweeper and Sudoku are available to download, free of charge, right now on your Windows Phone 7 device. There’s only one stipulation: you’ve gotta be a US resident. Damn!

Both titles feature Achieviements and multiple modes of play — in Sudoku, you’ve got Classic or Lightning mode, while Minesweeper boasts Classic and Speed modes. You can download each by following the links below.

SOURCE via Microsoft

Dice have released some stunning new Battlefield 3 screenshots on the Battlefield blog. They’re taken from the Operation Metro map that alpha testers have been playing on recently, and the E3 demo level, Thunder Run, which is a roaming tank battle, set in the desert.

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Sunday during the annual DEFCON convention (19), a 10-year-old hacker revealed a zero-day exploit in Android and iOS games. Going by the alias “CyFi,” the California girl wouldn’t reveal which games were affected by the exploit (for obvious reasons), but CNET reports that independent researchers have confirmed the exploit as a new class of vulnerability.

While speaking with CNET an hour before her presentation, CyFi said that she discovered the flaw back in January 2011 because she grew bored with the slow pace of farm-based games. “It was hard to make progress in the game, because it took so long for things to grow,” she said. “So I thought, ‘Why don’t I just change the time?’”

Based on her testimony, there wasn’t any real hacking involved. Instead, most of the games she discovered containing the exploit featured time-dependent factors. CyFi admitted that she didn’t want to wait ten hours for a certain crop to grow, so she instead manually advanced her tablet’s clock ahead ten hours – this reportedly opened up the exploit.

She then took her discovery a bit further. Typically most games will detect and block this kind of cheat, but she discovered that it was much more difficult for the game to detect her manipulation once she disconnected her device from the Wi-Fi network. Making incremental adjustments to the clock also proved difficult to detect.

CyFi’s presentation was part of the DEFCON Kids, a spinoff of the popular hacker convention that allows kids to participate in demos and workshops such as learning how to open master locks, Google hacking, making electronics, social engineering, coding from scratch and more.

“There will be a workroom for kids to participate in hacking activities anytime throughout the two days, including a Codebreaking Museum, a Makerbot and the Hardware Hacking Station,” reads the convention description. “The rooms are on a first-come, first-serve basis. There will also be contests just for kids, including social engineering and lockpicking.”

After CyFi’s presentation, the sponsors offered a $100 reward to the young hacker who found the most games with her newly-discovered exploit over the following 24 hours.

Khronos released OpenGL 4.2 as a new version of the cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API earlier today at Siggraph.

The new version integrates shaders with atomic counters as well as load, store and atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture. Additionally, there is support for GPU-tessellated geometry, the modification of an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU for significant performance improvements, and the ability to pack multiple 8 and 16 bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing.

“OpenGL 4.2 has integrated feedback from developers that are shipping significant OpenGL-based applications and games, making for a faster, more capable API which will continue to evolve to meet market needs,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, working group chair of the OpenGL ARB and director of Tegra graphics at Nvidia.

Both AMD and Nvidia said that their products will support OpenGL 4.2 in the immediate future.

Microsoft’s OS is estimated to account for about 42 percent of active operating system share this year, while 94 percent of all PCs shipped this year will come with Windows 7 pre-installed.

“By the end of 2011, nearly 635 million new PCs worldwide are expected to be shipped with Windows 7. Many enterprises have been planning their deployment of Windows 7 for the last 12 to 18 months, and are now moving rapidly to Windows 7,” said Annette Jump, research director at Gartner.

According to Gartner, Mac OS X is gaining share and is slowly chipping away at Microsoft. Gartner said that Mac OS was shipped on 4 percent of new PCs worldwide in 2010 versus 3.3 percent in 2008. Mac OS X is forecast to be on 4.5 percent of PCs in 2011, and grow to 5.2 percent of new PCs in 2015.

“The adoption of Mac PCs and Mac OS is a result of Apple’s ability to grow well above the market average in the last 12 to 24 months, thanks to its ease of use from the user interface (UI) point of view and ease of integration with other Apple devices, such as the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and the existing Apple ecosystem of applications and programs,” Jump said.

Wednesday News Corp reported a 22-percent drop in fiscal fourth quarter earnings, part of which included a $254 million after-tax loss (or 10-cents a share) stemming from the sale of its fledgling social website, MySpace.

Back in June, News Corp sold MySpace to digital ad network Specific Media for $35 million (plus a 5-percent stake in Specific Media), but originally paid $580 million in 2005. Justin Timberlake also reportedly took an ownership stake of MySpace and will “play a major role in developing the creative direction and strategy for the company moving forward.”

“There’s a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect,” Timberlake said back in June. “Myspace has the potential to be that place. Art is inspired by people and vice versa, so there’s a natural social component to entertainment. I’m excited to help revitalize Myspace by using its social media platform to bring artists and fans together in one community.”

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Seagate said that it has shipped one million Momentus XT solid state hybrid hard drives for laptop PCs since spring 2010.

The company indicated that it will be following this path in the foreseeable time as a strategy to leverage fast flash memory in mass storage media while maintaining the low cost level of hard drive technology.

Seagate said that its XT drives have been shipping to Alienware, Asus, Dell, Sony and Toshiba. The 7200 RPM models integrate 4 GB of flash memory and are available with capacities of up to 500 GB. They promise up to 50 percent faster boot ups than traditional 5400 RPM drives.

Seagate stated that high-performance SSDs are still not an alternative for hard drives in mainstream mass storage as “they cost as much as 10 times more than hard disk drives of the same capacity, with the price of a 250 GB SSD outstripping even the cost of many laptop PCs.” According to the manufacturer, consumers are not willing to pay or simply cannot afford the higher price of the SSD. Of course, Seagate has a significant interest in the hard drive keeping its price/capacity advantage over flash as the hard drive and the technology enabling it is the company’s bread and butter.