NEW YORK - TV shows were replaced by the hiss of static in perhaps 1 million U.S. homes Friday as stations ended their analog broadcasts and abandoned the transmission technology in use since the days of Milton Berle, Sid Caesar and Howdy Doody.

The vast majority of households that rely on antennas for their TV signals were prepared for the shutdown, but many people remained vexed by the challenge of setting up digital reception.

Hundreds of people began lining up about 3 a.m. Friday outside the Freestore Foodbank in Cincinnati, five hours before the agency began giving out 250 free digital converter boxes. The center had given all the converters away by 10:30 a.m., and many people were still in line.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Videogame players will soon get to tinker with some of the grimmest times in history.

“Darkest of Days” due for release in August blends history and game play in a first-person shooter with settings from the US Civil War; the destruction of Pompeii; the Battle of Little Big Horn, and both world wars.

Aaron Schurman of 8Monkey Labs described the videogame as “a wild time travel adventure” while giving AFP a preview of his brainchild.

Players start the game as a member of General Custer’s unit trying in vain to fend off annihilation by Native American Indian warriors in Montana during Old West days in 1876.

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NEW YORK - Amazon.com Inc. will pay $51 million to Toys R Us Inc. to end a long-standing legal dispute between the online retailer and the toy seller.

In a filing Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Amazon said it agreed Thursday to settle the dispute, which began in 2004.

Amazon will make the payment, “substantially all of which was unanticipated,” in the third quarter, which begins July 1. But the company said it will be charged to operating expenses in the second quarter.

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SAN FRANCISCO - A California company claims that the Internet-filtering software China has mandated for all new personal computers sold there contains stolen programming code.

Solid Oak Software of Santa Barbara said Friday that parts of its filtering software, which is designed for parents, are being used in the “Green Dam-Youth Escort” filtering software that must be packaged with all computers sold in China from July 1.

Solid Oak’s founder, Brian Milburn, said he plans to seek an injunction against the Chinese developer that built the software, but acknowledged that it’s new legal terrain for his company.

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SAN FRANCISCO - Craigslist, one of the Internet’s top sites for classified ads, is thriving while newspapers and other marketing-driven media are reeling from huge revenue losses, according to a report to be released Wednesday.

Launched as an e-mail list in 1995, Craigslist’s revenue is on pace to rise 23 percent this year to reach $100 million for the first time, based on an analysis by classified advertising industry consultants Advanced Interactive Media Group.

A spokeswoman for privately held Craigslist declined to comment on the revenue estimate, citing the San Francisco-based company’s long-standing refusal to discuss its finances.

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The annual Apple Design Awards are a bit like the Oscars. Sure, in the week-to-week of the film industry, people might be more concerned about the box-office take, but it’s the critical reception that really helps the high-quality products shine. Similarly, the listings for the top-selling programs in the App Store might grab the attention of consumers, but the ADA exists to reward technical and design excellence in software engineering for Apple’s platforms.

The awards, which acknowledge both Mac and iPhone apps, are judged by a team of engineers inside Apple. This year, 65 engineers worked in addition to their day jobs to winnow down the huge pool of competitors into just a handful of winners. Judges looked for a handful of criteria in handing out awards, among them technological innovation, technology integration & adoption, connectedness, localization, design & quality, and performance tuning & optimization.

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(CNET) — SAN FRANCISCO –The big knock on Apple — whether or not it’s always been accurate — is that its products are more expensive than most of its competitors. 

But in the keynote speech Monday that opened Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, it became clear the company is tackling the price question head on.

The best example of this new attitude is the decision to keep the 8GB iPhone 3G, but sell it at $99. That was the most aggressive price move it made Monday.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Research released Tuesday indicates that US parents are rearing a young gadget generation that is at home with smartphones, laptop computers, and videogame consoles.

US households with children between the ages of four and 14 have an average of 11 electronic gizmos, according to a Kids & Consumer Electronics report from industry tracker NPD Group.

One third of parents surveyed for the study said they plan to buy their child a consumer electronics device in the coming year.

Younger children are in line for electronic learning toys while older offspring can expect mobile telephones or digital cameras, NPD found.

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(CNN) — English contains more words than any other language on the planet and will add its millionth word early Wednesday, according to the Global Language Monitor, a Web site that uses a math formula to estimate how often words are created.

The site estimates the millionth word will be added Wednesday at 5:22 a.m. Its live ticker counted 999,985 English words as of early Tuesday evening.

The “Million Word March,” however, has made the man who runs this word-counting project somewhat of a pariah in the linguistic community. Some linguists say it’s impossible to count the number of words in a language because languages are always changing, and because defining what counts as a word is a fruitless endeavor.

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T-Mobile USA data that was posted to the Internet over the weekend is genuine, but the company was not hacked, the U.S. carrier said Tuesday.

On Saturday, hackers posted what appear to be logfiles taken from T-Mobile’s network to the Full Disclosure mailing list, claiming to have hacked the carrier. “We have everything, their databases, confidential documents, scripts and programs from their servers, financial documents up to 2009,” they wrote.

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