Technology Info

Some will tell you that PC gaming is dying. Others will tell you it’s never been stronger. Whomever you listen to, though, one thing is clear: the PC gaming industry is in a state of flux, as its key players search for workable business models to keep up with the times. At the forefront of these initiatives is Microsoft, which has for better or for worse attempted some branding and platform-development schemes that, at least to some industry players, hasn’t done a whole lot other than further stagger the PC gaming market.

Microsoft’s Games for Windows initiative and its Windows Live gaming platform are the company’s two apparent answers to the PC gaming problem. Together, these two plans were put into motion to help build a more structured and highly-visible unified “platform”: a face to PC gaming that was more cohesive, more organized, more centralized for the gaming experience. The idea was to make PC gaming more accessible and to provide a place for gamers to unite, to click—the Xbox Live strategy applied to the fragmented PC market. If it weren’t for all that darn piracy, they say. But really, the heart of the problem is the company’s approach. (link)

There are a few different reasons you might not be playing on the same Xbox 360 system that you originally bought. You might have upgraded to an Elite system for the bigger hard drive and black HDMI. More likely, your original system died and you were forced to have it replaced. Gamers who received new systems were in for an unpleasant surprise when they redownloaded their Arcade games or hooked up their old hard drive: the games they paid for would only work when connected to the Internet. No network connection, and they all reverted to demo versions. Microsoft has just released a tool that allows you to move those licenses over to a new console, but the question remains: what took so long? (link)

Microsoft will ship Windows 7 sometime in or near Jan. 2010, according to a letter company senior vice president Bill Veghte sent to Microsoft customers Tuesday.

The letter, sent to enterprise and business customers, will eventually be publicly posted on Microsoft’s Web site.
In the letter sent to “Windows Customers” and titled “An Update on the Windows Roadmap,” Veghte said “our plan is to deliver Windows 7 approximately three years after the January 2007 general availability launch date of Windows Vista.”

Veghte wrote, “You have told us you want a more regular, predictable Windows release schedule” and he said that was the impetus for setting the 2010 the ship date.

Vista has been slowly gaining steam, but is still drawing fire from critics who say it has not lived up to promises. (link)

Dell Inc. will charge customers up to $50 for factory-installed Windows XP on some PCs after Wednesday, according to the company’s Web site.

Buyers of the low-priced Vostro line of desktops and notebooks will pay $20 to $50 more for Windows XP Professional installed as a “downgrade” from Windows Vista Business or Vista Ultimate than they would for Vista only.

To meet Microsoft Corp.’s June 30 end-of-availability deadline, Dell will stop pre-installing most versions of the seven-year-old operating system after tomorrow. However, it will still be able to ship PCs with XP by taking advantage of the downgrade rights built into Vista Business and Vista Ultimate. Downgrading lets Dell install Windows XP Professional in lieu of Vista, although the newer operating system is still shipped with the machine so that buyers can, if or when they want, transition from XP to Vista. (link)

Work-related RSI cases are at an all-time high and the cost to businesses is spiralling, new Microsoft research reveals.

Repetitive strain injury cases have soared by over 30 percent in the last year, costing businesses over US$600 million in lost working hours - and causing pain and debilitating discomfort to over-worked staff.

Microsoft claims the rapidly emerging trend of ‘mobile working’ - with office-based employees now working on the move for an average of an hour more per day than they did two years ago using laptops and mobile devices - is behind this alarming climb in work-related injury.

The company arrived at its conclusions in a poll among over 1,000 office workers, HR managers and office managers. This showed rthat 68 percent of office workers suffered from aches and pains, with the most common symptoms including back ache, shoulder pain and wrist/hand pain. (link)

Microsoft Corp. is abandoning its effort to scan whole libraries and make their contents searchable, a sign it may be getting choosier about the fights it will pick with Google Inc.

The world’s largest software maker is under pressure to show it has a coherent strategy for turning around its unprofitable online business after its bid for Yahoo Inc., last valued at US$47.5 billion, collapsed this month.

Digitizing books and archiving academic journals no longer fits with the company’s plan for its search operation, wrote Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s search and advertising group, in a blog post Friday. (link)

The Zune has made its first retail appearance in Canada. Come June 13th, our friends to the north will be able to get their hands on Microsoft’s media players, starting at $139.99 (for the 4GB flash variety), up to $249.99 for the big-daddy 80GB version. Pre-orders are being taken now, but something tells us you’ll be able to get one on launch day regardless. (Engadget)
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The NPD console sales numbers have been released for April, stuffed with fascinating content. How did the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Grand Theft Auto stack up against each other? Did Mario Kart Wii sell as many copies as expected? Will Nintendo continue its winning streak?
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Before we break things down by company, it’s important to point out that the games industry is still going strong. “The industry continues to set a blistering sales pace, and now shows a year-to-date increase of 31 percent over last year’s record-setting revenues,” NPD Group’s Anita Frazier said. (link)

Microsoft plans to offer hardware vendors significant price cuts on Windows XP licenses for low-cost computing products, but the deal will only be available for computers with low hardware specs. This tactic is part of Microsoft’s strategy to stifle adoption of Linux by computer manufacturers that are targeting the budget market, where low cost and high flexibility give the open source operating system an edge.

The popularity of the game-changing Asus Eee PC, which ships with a heavily-modified version of the Xandros Linux distribution, spawned a whole new class of inexpensive computers. Other vendors have entered the market with their own competing products, many of which also use the open source operating system. Windows is a poor fit for such computers, which are designed and priced like budget appliances. Vista requires too much hardware overhead, while Windows XP licenses add extra expense to the budget hardware that can be avoided by using Linux. So as products like the Eee bring Linux into homes and schools, Microsoft has struggled to squeeze into the growing budget hardware niche. (link)

A recent statement from anti-malware and threat-detection software manufacturer PC Tools claims that Windows 2000 is a more secure operating system than Windows Vista. The company’s claims, as covered by Infoworld, have attracted a good deal of coverage—no one wants to miss out on a good Microsoft bashing—but an examination of the company’s methodology raises serious concerns about the validity of the conclusions.

According to company CEO Simon Clausen, “recent research conducted with statistics from over 1.4 million computers within the ThreatFire community has shown that Windows Vista is more susceptible to malware than the eight year old Windows 2000 operating system, and only 37 percent more secure than Windows XP.” This certainly sounds dire, and at first glance, the company’s numbers back its statements up. Data reports from the company’s ThreatFire security program state that Vista allowed an average of 639 threats per 1,000 computers “through.” Through, in this case, presumably means that the malware in question successfully installed itself and became active. (link)