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President and CEO of Viacom Philippe Dauman has announced that Rock Band 3 will be making its release this holiday season, and Kotaku reports him saying the title will “innovate and revolutionize the music genre”.

We all know how Rock Band help to solidify the music genre in gaming. However, we also all know how the sales of music games have been steadily declining over the past year. With many competitors seeking to bring some life back into the genre, such as Power Gig: Rise of the SixString (image below), Rock Band 3 definitely has quite a task ahead of itself in order to regain the audience it helped to create.

(This image is of  Power Gig: Rise of the SixString’s innovative six string peripheral.. definitely a different approach than the Rock Band franchise)

The Rock Band Facebook page said this regarding the announcement of the games release date,

Harmonix is developing Rock Band 3 for worldwide release this holiday season! The game, which will be published by MTV Games and distributed by Electronic Arts, will innovate and revolutionize the music genre once again, just as Harmonix did with the original Rock Band, Rock Band 2 and The Beatles: Rock Band. Stay tuned for more details!

Do you think Rock Band 3 has a chance of being as successful as its predecessors? Will it be able to breathe some life back into the music gaming genre, or are you tired of the Rock Band franchise?

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Reports today from Macnn, among many other Apple centric sources, report the iPad will not ship with many of the stock apps that were shipped with most iterations of the iPhone and iPod Touch OS. The apps and utilities omitted by Apple for, at least, the first generation of the iPad include Calculator, Stocks, Clock, Weather, and Voice Memos. Macnn reports it was issues scaling up the apps to the iPad’s larger screen that ultimately led to the omission of the apps from the final OS.

There were reports earlier in the week that there may be some type of Mac OS X widget- like functionality. However, these rumors seem to be nothing more than exactly that.

What do you think about Apple’s decision to omit these apps from the iPad? Do you think they will be reintroduced in a future version of the OS, possibly OS 4.0?

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Since the announcement that Capcom would be brining their highly successful Street Fighter IV title to the iPhone, there has been much speculation over just how well this type of 2D style fighting game, that relies heavily on precise inputs of button combos, will port to a device such as the iPhone that utilizes multi touch controls. The good news is that Kotaku reports the title is set for release in the App Store tonight that will allow us to get our first hands on feel of the game. The game will sell for $10. Below is a link to a video demo of the game in action for those who cant wait.

Street Fighter IV for iPhone Video Demo

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Owners of Microsoft’s Entourage and Office 2008 for Mac will be happy to learn that Microsoft has today released an update. The update to office, making it version v12.2.4 will include several improvements to performance and overall stability. Macnn also reported the update, “also included a number of fixes that address security vulnerabilities, helping to prevent an attacker from overwriting the computer’s memory using malicious code.”

The update for Entourage 2008 for Mac (Web Services Edition) featured several improvements to many aspects of the application including calendar, giving users the option of syncing tasks, notes, and categories with Exchange Server. There were also further logging features to help diagnose issues. You can get the free updates through the application or through the links below.

[Office download - 221MB] [Entourage download - 64MB]

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