by Caroline McCarthy
June 29, 2009 10:00 AM PDT

Not so long ago, the faces of gaming on social networks were those of zombies, vampires, and cuddly virtual pets. Now it's more along the lines of Michael Corleone or Tony Soprano. You've probably seen it in your news feed: From Facebook to MySpace and now Twitter, Mafia-themed games have more or less taken over.

Mobsters, a game created by development company Playdom, is the most popular application on MySpace's platform. Mafia Wars, owned by Zynga, is a huge hit on Facebook. The Social Gaming Network has an iPhone app called Mafia: Respect and Retaliation. And earlier this month, a Twitter-based game called 140 Mafia launched. The craze appears to have started with a Facebook app called Mob Wars, which was built by a smaller company called Psycho Monkey.

The premises of most of these games are the same. You can found or join a "mob" with friends from the social network that the game has been built on. You can carry out missions, including "killing" other players in rival mobs, in order to earn points. Your activities are broadcast, via news feeds or Twitter posts, to your friends on the network in question.

With the mobster gaming craze, social-network developers may have found the secret to bringing multiplayer role-playing games--long the lucrative domain of ultrageeks--fully into the mainstream. They can build elaborate role-playing scenarios with points, levels, teams, and weapons, but without the nerdy stigma that's become attached to fantasy-themed games in the vein of World of Warcraft.

by Ed Bott
June 29th, 2009 @ 1:45 pm

One of the most frequent questions I get these days comes from people who’ve been running the Windows 7 beta and RC and are planning to upgrade to the final version when it’s available on October 22. “Which edition of Windows 7 do I need?” Interestingly, this question also comes up in other contexts as well.

When Apple defenders appear in the TalkBack section here, they regularly insist that the Home Premium edition is “crippled” and “stripped-down.” Sooner or later, they insist, any self-respecting Windows user will have to upgrade. Based on that argument, they say that you must use the more expensive Ultimate edition to compare the costs of a Windows PC to those of a Mac, which comes in only a single edition. As you’ll see from the table below, this isn’t accurate.

On the Windows side, many users just automatically assume that more is better. By that logic, Ultimate is obviously the best and lesser versions are inferior. Because they’re power users, they assume that Home Premium’s missing features mean they’re going to be lacking a feature they really need. But is that true? If you’re buying Windows Home Premium, what features are you missing, exactly?

What would you get if you paid extra for Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate? And is it fair to compare OS X and Windows 7 Home Premium? A few weeks ago, I did an exhaustive comparison of the differences between Windows 7 editions. For the comparison here, I decided to strip the list down to a single, simple table, which represents the entire list of features that are in Professional or Ultimate editions that are not in Home Premium edition (with one esoteric exception, which I documetned at the end of the notes page).

By Nick Farrell
Monday, 29 June 2009, 12:06

DELL is in trouble over the pond after a Judge ruled that the tinman was making a 'mockery of the system'. Judge Rosemary Ledet was furious that Dell's legal team had a habit of producing documents in a piecemeal manner in a civil lawsuit over New Orleans' CCTV camera system.

As the gavel fell on Dell, Ledet ordered the hardware outfit to pay $25,000 in fines. The plaintiffs' attorneys have also requested nearly $182,000 in fees and expenses. Southern Electronics Supply and Active Solutions sued in 2007, claiming the surveillance system they developed was misappropriated by people within and with ties to the city's technology department.

They claimed that the techies were in a conspiracy with Dell to sell the system. Dell and the other defendants, including Mayor Ray Nagin have denied the claims. Dell attorney Phillip Wittmann said that Dell was not dragging its feet or playing games in discovery. He said that more than 160,000 pages of documents have been produced, and that e-mails and other information have been handed over.

However Ledet said that Dell was not even doing basic word searches for the "camera" on its servers which might have shown emails and other documents between Dell executives, including its glorious CEO and founder Michael Dell. Ledet ordered a search using specific words and said the sides can discuss how to proceed if the search yields a huge amount of records.

By Nick Farrell
Friday, 26 June 2009, 10:11

FACEBOOK'S number one techie has ripped into AMD and Intel for producing server processors that don't deliver performance gains. Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook veep of technical operations, said salespeople from Chipzilla and AMD will promise the known world, but when the chips are down, the new technology doesn't do anything wonderful.

He said he is constantly trying to upgrade Facebook's infrastructure to keep up with growth in users and data, while trying to minimise power consumption to save money. But the new microarchitectures and the performance gains the chip heavyweights tout in the press are not reflected in Facebook's applications. Heiliger said that his team is scratching its collective head and wondering why that is. Surely it could not be because the chip industry is telling porkies?

He also slagged off server OEMs who he said "did not get it". Servers flogged to Facebook have to be cheap and super power-efficient. But OEMs really don't do enough to provide what Facebook wants when it comes to large computing clusters, Heiliger said. So far the hardware industry has fallen short when it comes to delivering very power-efficient servers to carry out a limited set of functions for big customers such as Facebook and Amazon, he added.

by Christopher Dawson
June 27th, 2009 @ 9:11 pm

I finally installed the Windows 7 release candidate that the folks from Microsoft were kind enough to pass on a couple weeks ago at the Intel Classmate Ecosystem Summit. I could have installed it on my Mac, but I already have Vista running with Boot Camp with a fair amount of Windows software that I didn’t want to reinstall (or couldn’t for lack of install media).

I thought about installing it on my primary desktop at work (running Ubuntu 9.04 at the moment) since that’s a bit older and I could assess its speed on legacy hardware, but it lacked a DVD drive. So I installed it on my oldest son’s laptop. This was the same kid who, almost a year ago, declared that he “hated Linux”. He has since grown to like Ubuntu, particularly 9.04, since it’s rock solid no matter where he manages to skulk about online.

However, it doesn’t work with his Zune and he prefers Office 2007 to OpenOffice. Until now, I’ve told him to suck it up and have an old XP desktop in the study that he and his brothers use for syncing iPods and Zunes. Ubuntu, after all, is free, and requires no maintenance from me, no matter what dark, malware-infested corners of the Internet he happens to explore. However, Windows 7 has been very well-reviewed, the release candidate has a reputation for being more solid than most retail releases from Microsoft, and I had a free copy on DVD that I really wanted to test.

So on it went. And I have to admit that it went on very quickly, with no challenges or drama. The install speed was certainly comparable to Ubuntu’s and everything internal to the machine has worked out of the box. We’ll see about peripherals soon enough, but I’m not actually anticipating any problems. Here, however, is the real question. With speculation on Windows 7 pricing keeping the blogosphere busy, will 7 be good enough to actually pay for?

by Steven Musil
June 28, 2009 6:20 PM PDT

Microsoft is putting Internet ad agency Razorfish up for sale, according to a Financial Times report Sunday. Microsoft, which acquired Razorfish in 2007 as part of its $6 billion takeover of Aquantive, has reportedly hired Morgan Stanley to find a potential buyer. The report identified French marketing company Publicis Groupe as a potential buyer.

Formerly known as Avenue A/Razorfish, the agency was credited with designing the logo for Microsoft's new search engine Bing, as well as creating the online ads for the ensuing publicity campaign. The Seattle-base agency has more than 2,000 employees and counts Dell, Disney, and Nike among its clients. One analyst cited in the FT.com report estimated Razorfish could be worth $600 million to $700 million. Representatives for Microsoft and Razorfish did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

The deal for Aquantive was Microsoft's largest ever and highlighted the importance of supporting more-advanced advertising products and technologies across areas including media planning, video on demand and Internet Protocol television. The acquisition of Razorfish specifically was considered especially important it would give Microsoft a new presence in the ad services business and also help promote its rich media and video plug-in Silverlight.

By Matthew Braga
June 28, 2009 11:30 PM CT

Ditching the mouse and keyboard means a whole lot more than just doing without two common peripherals. As those who've worked with Microsoft Surface have found out, you have to jettison decades of GUI baggage and start with a whole new mindset. For most, the traditional combination of mouse and keyboard is not just a mode of computer input, but a way of life.

While it has been decades since both technologies were first welcomed to the mainstream, little about their core functionality has changed; side-by-side, the aesthetics may be different, but a 486 and modern-day Mac effectively use the same basic interface paradigm. It is perhaps for this reason then, that in recent years, both users and developers alike have approached the wide-scale adoption of touchscreen technology with more of a walk than a run.

While the technology has increased in use, it has usually done so as an augment to the traditional mouse and keyboard, proving that the force of habit is hard to break. Yet, about a year ago, Microsoft promised something new, with the launch of its multi-touch computing table, Surface. No keyboard, no mouse—just a table with a screen. Developers quickly realized that designing for Surface is more than an exercise in coding—serious consideration has to be given to constructing a coherent user interface for a device that completely forgoes the standard mode of input that has been in use for almost half a century.

From an interface perspective, touch- and multi-touch-based implementations like the Microsoft Surface are still very much in their infancy. While there are many things the device does well, there are still a number of curious design quirks that make developing an entirely touch-dependant UI challenging. With an increasing number of developers worldwide gaining access to Surface in recent months, a much clearer picture is forming of what the future may hold for Surface and similar technologies.

by Paul Murphy
June 27th, 2009 @ 12:15 am

According to the Techserve alliance U.S IT jobs fell by another 34,800 jobs in May to end about 5% below the record levels recorded in November 2008. That’s about a fifth below the overall employment decline because the new taxes and regulations driving this are mainly aimed at the roots of the economy: primary production and manufacturing, where IT employment is both relatively limited and less variable than in secondary manufacturing and services.

We can expect, however, to see the IT percentage job loss number rise as the effects percolate through the economy and the next round of tax increases takes effect. There would have been, for example, only perhaps two or three IT staff among the 495 laid off in Tampa when Altadis was forced to close its cigar factory but many more will be affected as these people become net wealth consumers rather than producers.

It’s in this context of deteriorating employment opportunities for IT workers that I noticed something odd, or at least unexpected, about the little sample I get from the flood of resumes zipping around between placement firms. The initial leaks about IBM buying Sun sparked an obvious and immediate surge in the number of Sun people casting around for new job opportunities - some senior people actually moved, many juniors quietly sent out updated resumes, and lots of people talked about poaching talent or leveraging contacts to create new businesses.

Many, presumably most, of these people are still looking and talking, but the surprise has been that the reality of the Oracle deal seems to be associated with a reduction, rather than an increase, in the number of Sun employees looking to jump. Given the state of the economy you’d expect more people to value the jobs they have, but while I’m told that attrition is up a bit at Sun, the number of current Sun employee resumes in recruiter in-baskets seems to be dropping relative to what it was in April.

by Tom Krazit
and Declan McCullagh
June 26, 2009 1:43 PM PDT

It happens time and time again: when news breaks, the Internet slows. It's quite obvious at this point that the Internet has muscled its way into the lives of anyone who needs information. And Michael Jackson's death Thursday had as great an impact on the Internet as anything in the history of the medium that didn't involve the World Trade Center.

The statistics are amazing: Akamai said worldwide Internet traffic was 11 percent higher than normal during the peak hours between 3 p.m. PDT and 4 p.m., when news of Jackson's death was breaking. That traffic forced even Google to its knees for a brief period of time Thursday afternoon. Can a system that has trouble keeping up with ever-increasing demand for its services be considered a reliable source of information when a true crisis emerges?

After an editor banished a budding argument between CNET News' Tom Krazit and Declan McCullagh from a company-wide mailing list, we decided to let them fight it out here. Tom: How can any system that doesn't work precisely when people need it the most be considered the future of communications? In a way, it took the death of perhaps the greatest entertainer of the last century to expose a key truth of this century: our new favorite communications tool, the Internet, buckles in times of crisis.

News sites, including this one, were sluggish or completely offline at the peak of demand for information, forcing many to go back in time and flip on the television. What if something really happens? How can companies trying to build information-related businesses on the Internet ever hope to supplant existing communications networks if they fail at the moment of truth? CNN's telecast didn't go down Thursday.

By Ryan Paul
June 26, 2009 3:03 PM CT

Google has launched a new native development toolkit for Android that will make it possible for third-party Android application developers to use C and C++. Google has also released an Android scripting environment that supports Python and Lua.

Google's open source Android operating system is maturing and beginning to attract a more diverse audience of third-party developers. To accommodate the growing need for more power and flexibility, Google is opening up the platform to additional programming languages and new kinds of development. The Android userspace is largely dominated by Java technologies that run on top of Google's custom Dalvik Java virtual machine.

At launch, Java was the only officially supported programming language for building distributable third-party Android software. That's starting to change as Google introduces new options. On Thursday, the company announced the availability of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) which will allow developers to build Android software components with C and C++. The NDK will enable developers to code some of the performance-sensitive parts of their programs in C and reuse existing C code on the Android platform.

It comes with some limitations, however, and is not intended to serve as a full alternative to Android's Java development model. The NDK does not provide access to platform framework APIs. It's intended to be used alongside Java to code individual parts of programs that require existing C libraries or higher performance. JNI is used as the bridge between Java and native code. The NDK includes a cross-compiler toolchain for generating ARM binaries that can be deployed in Android APK packages.

By Gregg Keizer
June 25, 2009 09:01 AM ET

For two weeks starting Friday, Microsoft will pre-sell Windows 7 upgrades for as little as $50. "As a way of saying thanks to our loyal Windows customers, we are excited to introduce a special limited time offer," Microsoft spokesman Brandon LeBlanc said in an entry to a company blog early Thursday.

Microsoft offered a similar deal prior to the launch of Windows Vista three years ago. "For customers in the U.S., Canada and Japan, starting tomorrow on June 26, they will be able to pre-order a copy of Windows 7 for delivery on October 22 of either Home Premium or Windows 7 Professional," said Brad Brooks, vice president for Windows consumer marketing, in a video interview posted alongside LeBlanc's blog post. "[For] Home Premium in the U.S., pricing will be $49.99, and the Professional version will be $99.99."

Those figures represent a reduction of between 50% and 58% from the standard list prices for the upgrade editions of Windows 7 Home Premium and Professional. Orders can be placed with participating retailers, such as Best Buy and Amazon.com, or at Microsoft's own online store. The pre-order discount prices are valid from June 26 through July 11 in the U.S. and Canada, but end July 5 in Japan. Customers in the U.K., France and Germany will be offered similar pre-order discounts starting July 15, said LeBlanc.

Microsoft's pre-order discount was not a surprise. Several weeks ago, a leaked memo from retailer Best Buy had disclosed the limited-time pricing plan. Microsoft also revealed list prices for Windows 7 today, cutting the price of only one of the three retail editions, even though consumers face tough economic times. "We are reducing the [list] price of our most popular retail product for customers, the Home Premium Upgrade, by approximately 10%, depending on the market," said LeBlanc.

by Oliver Marks
June 25th, 2009 @ 11:41 pm

I’m in seat 14c on a Virgin America flight back from Boston to San Francisco after an exhilarating Enterprise 2.0 Conference. There’s a lot of similarities between this airline and the Enterprise 2.0 movement.

The plane has wifi and a good modern user experience but essentially hooks into and relies on a large amount of legacy infrastructure: the airport and runway I just took off from isn’t changing anytime soon and serves a broad variety of other aircraft transporting people and materials. The analogy is with core enterprise technology: Enterprise 2.0 is still considered in many quarters almost a fashion statement, just as Virgin America is thought of by some as a boutique airline.

There’s some truth in those ideas. Enterprise software is the heavy duty infrastructure of most companies, with tight security, communication controls and many processes like an airport. Departmental collaboration environments are like the aircraft - an important enabling component but not seen by most as the core. When Enterprise 2.0 expands to serve the entire company, as is the case with some of the larger installations and unification plans we saw at the conference, it aspires to be at the core of the enterprise.

There are players in the space who are already in the this position of course: IBM have a huge installed base of Lotus Notes and associated Domino databases, while Microsoft have their exchange email solutions and of course Sharepoint. Microsoft chose to deploy flying screaming monkeys towards attendees at regular intervals from their booth - possibly a tongue in cheek recognition of their status as the wicked witch of the north (west) amongst the many innovative vendors and practitioners that surrounded them.

by Tom Krazit
June 25, 2009 11:39 AM PDT

Yahoo's first annual shareholder meeting with Carol Bartz as CEO was largely uneventful, as she promised to turn Yahoo around by focusing on content and organization. The actual business of the meeting was brief: all 12 nominees up for reelection to the board of directors were approved, three company-sponsored proposals were approved, and a shareholder "say on pay" proposal was rejected.

Bartz spent most of the meeting talking about the work she has been doing to get Yahoo back on track, emphasizing that Yahoo has a strategy; it just needs to "execute"--business-speak for "not screw up all the time." "We try to make sure we have 'wow' experiences for anybody who comes to a Yahoo site," Bartz said. She reminded shareholders several times that Yahoo is as much a content company as a search company, calling Yahoo "the largest online media company."

This, of course, deflects comparisons to Google, who's stock has dramatically outperformed Yahoo's over the last several years. Shareholders asked few pointed questions during their turn at the microphone. Bartz was asked twice to defend Yahoo's commitment to human rights in China, at a time when the Chinese government seems to be playing a more active role in cutting off Internet access to topics it doesn't like. She made it clear that Yahoo isn't crazy about such crackdowns, but also said "Yahoo was not incorporated to fix China."

One shareholder asked Bartz to stop "dumbing-down the home page," which tends to carry the celebrity gossip story of the day as its main item. Yahoo is working on ways to give users a "fluffmeter," as Bartz put it, where they could choose just how much Jon and Kate news they want to see when visiting Yahoo. Bartz didn't elaborate, but it seems that could come along with a home page redesign later this year.

By Jacqui Cheng
June 25, 2009 12:15 PM CT

Google found that its search engine and services were temporarily blocked in China this week while Microsoft's Bing began filtering for sensitive topics and China's Ministry of Health announced that sexual health sites will soon be banned. China has been in the news more than usual lately as it continues to go after popular search engines for supposedly disseminating porn.

This week, users of Google's services experienced unexplained access problems in China. Meanwhile, sexual health sites are on the verge of being blocked, and Microsoft's Bing has agreed to censor its Chinese search results. Google has been under fire in China lately for not doing enough to block porn from entering the country over the Internet. Late last week, the government began blocking access to certain Google results in an attempt to remedy this problem, even as Google pledged to step up its efforts to fight porn in China.

China is impatient, however, and Google is not perfect, leading to this week's temporary blocks of Google's services. Users began reporting that they were unable to access Google.com, Google.cn, or a number of Google's services (Gmail, Google Docs, etc.) on Wednesday evening. As of Thursday morning, this was apparently still the case—Google acknowledged the outage in a statement sent to the AFP, saying that the company was "investigating the matter."

As of this writing, however, it appears as if access has been restored to Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou, at least according to our checks through WebSitePulse's Great Firewall test. On a related note, China's Ministry of Health has announced that even sexual health websites will soon be banned within China as part of the country's overall war against porn, and that only medical experts will be able to have access.

By Gavin Clarke
25th June 2009 23:10 GMT

Microsoft's Bing has run in to trouble for allegedly looking too much like a smaller rival's search service. Kayak.com, an airline search engine, has complained to Microsoft that the look and feel of Bing's travel service looks too much like its own, and that this will confuse users.

"We have contacted them through official channels about concerns about the similarities between Bing and Kayak," Kayak's chief marketing officer Robert Birge reportedly told Wired.com "From the look and feel of their travel product, they seem to agree with our approach to the market." A Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed the company has been contacted by Kayak.com.

"We are discussing the matter with Kayak. Bing Travel is based on independent development by Microsoft and Farecast.com, which Microsoft acquired in 2008. Any contrary allegations are without merit," the spokeswoman told The Reg.