| Windows 7 RTM arrives for Software Assurance customers
August 7, 2009 at 4:31 pm
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|   Volume License customers with an existing Software Assurance license are now able to download Windows 7 RTM in English via the Volume License Service Center. The rest of the languages for Windows 7 RTM should become available in the next few weeks. Windows Server 2008 R2 will be available to Volume License customers with an existing Software Assurance license on August 19. 
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| EC criticized for conduct during Intel investigation
August 7, 2009 at 4:17 pm
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|   Did the European Commission overlook some evidence during its antitrust investigation of Intel that might have influenced the outcome of the decision, which went against the chipmaker? The European Union ombudsman believes that may have been the case, saying that EC investigators failed to include details of a meeting that presented one PC mantufacturer's decision to choose Intel CPUs as being purely performance based. A copy of a yet-to-be-released report by the EU ombudsman was seen by the Wall Street Journal (subscription). It describes how an unidentified Dell executive told EC investigators in 2006 that AMD CPUs were problematic due to "very poor" performance. There's no way to know for sure what the exec said, however, because the EC didn't keep a written record of the conversation. And when Intel asked the Commission for a record of the interview, the EC denied that it ever took place and said there were no records of the meeting.
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| Friday Apple links and Poll Technica: mystery iMac features
August 7, 2009 at 3:49 pm
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|   It's Friday and we haven't done an Apple links post in a while. Did you miss us? There were a handful of tidbits that caught our eye in the last week that didn't quite make it into their own posts. Bonus poll at the end!
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| Storing text docs in XML may run afoul of Microsoft patent
August 7, 2009 at 2:04 pm
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|   In the middle part of this decade, Microsoft engaged in an extensive effort to create open standards derived from its own XML-based file formats, such as XPS and Office XML. This work was widely interpreted as an effort to forestall adoption of competing formats, such as the Open Document Format, and concerns were raised about whether the Office XML format was severely encumbered by the company's patents. Despite these fears, Microsoft ultimately saw its efforts succeed. A recently granted patent, however, reveals that the entire effort took place while Microsoft had a patent pending that covers nearly any use of XML for storing word processing documents. The patent was filed back in late 2004 and was apparently approved only this month. It's entitled "Word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML," but it appears to cover the use of an entire class of XML documents by any word processing program.
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| Twitter not so popular with the young people
August 7, 2009 at 1:58 pm
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|   Twitter has a reputation as that "new Internet trend" that's all the rage among kids, but recent data suggests that an older crowd is what's really driving Twitter's growth. Sparked by a very unscientific Morgan Stanley report (PDF) about how teens apparently don't use Twitter, market research powerhouse Nielsen decided to take a look at its own data from a NetRatings panel of over 250,000 US Internet users. While "teens don't tweet" is a pretty gross generalization of the data, the young'uns don't make up as significant of a group as one might expect. According to Nielsen's data, Twitter reached 10.7 percent of all active Internet users in 2009 "despite a lack of widespread adoption by children, teens, and young adults." The firm notes that people under the age of 25 make up almost a quarter of all US Internet users and yet only 16 percent of Twitter's audience in June of 2009, meaning that Twitter is "under-indexing" the youth market compared to the Internet as a whole. Conversely, the large majority of Twitter users (64 percent) fell into the 25 to 54 age group, and 20 percent were 55+. That's right: there were more Twitter users who are our parents' age than those who are in high school or college.
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| Batman: Arkham Asylum demo sells game, characters feel fresh
August 7, 2009 at 12:28 pm
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|   Batman has been doing a good job of delivering what seems to be an adult experience in Teen-level ratings these days. The Dark Knight was a sometimes-disturbing look into the world of Batman, with a now-iconic take on the sociopathic joker... that came with a PG-13 rating. Batman: Arkham Asylum likewise delivers a brutal fighting system and mature themes in a game that comes complete with a Teen rating. The demo for the title is out now—for the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC—and it's pretty much your duty as a gamer to give it a go.
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| The Smoking Gun exposes PrankNet as Internet badboys cower
August 7, 2009 at 12:15 pm
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|   The Smoking Gun this week released the results of its lengthy investigation into PrankNet, an online community specializing in disturbing phone pranks. The operators operated under a veil of anonymity, covering their tracks and using Skype to place non-traceable phone calls. When TSG eventually exposed the ringleader as a young man living in Canada, however, the results were predictably pathetic. On July 21, a pair of TSG reporters approached "Dex"'s building at 1637 Assumption Street in Windsor, where he lives in the ground-floor 'B' apartment. Calling to his mother, who was standing near an open living room window, a reporter asked her to summon her son. The woman disappeared into "Dex"'s adjoining bedroom, where the pair could be heard whispering. Despite repeated requests to come out and speak with TSG, "Dex" hid with his mother in his bedroom, the windows of which were covered with plastic shopping bags, a towel, and one black trash bag. As the sun set and his room darkened, "Dex" did not reach to turn on a light. The notorious Internet Tough Guy, who has gleefully used the telephone to cause all kinds of havoc, was now himself panicking. He had been found. And, as a result, was barricaded in Pranknet World Headquarters with his mom, while two reporters loitered outside his window and curious neighbors wondered what was up.
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| PayPal come now be used to purchase 360 content, US only
August 7, 2009 at 11:37 am
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|   For those leery of using their credit card online, Microsoft has introduced a new method of payment for Xbox Live. PayPal can now be used to purchase Microsoft Points, the form of currency used in the Xbox marketplace. Users simply add a PayPal account to their payment options in the same way they would add a credit card. And while this is great news for PayPal users, it does come with a few drawbacks. Firstly, the service is only available to those in the US. Secondly, PayPal can only be used to purchase points on Xbox.com, not via an Xbox 360. You can, however, set up multiple PayPal accounts with one Xbox Live account. It's always great to have options, so the addition of PayPal as a form of payment is good news. And combined with the recent advent of XBLA games being made available on Amazon, it gives gamers plenty of choice for how they want to purchase their games. Now let's just hope Microsoft eventually rolls out these services in other regions as well. 
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| Blizzcon tickets sell out in just 8 minutes
August 7, 2009 at 10:40 am
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|   Blizzard Entertainment's semi-annual Blizzcon convention—celebrating all things Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo—is set to get underway later this month, and tickets are already sold out. In fact, according to Activision Blizzard, the 20,000 tickets for the event were all sold in an astounding eight minutes. Tickets to the convention were $125, more than either Comic Con or PAX. But for those who missed out, the event is also going to be available to watch via pay-per-view. Direct TV is offering over 16 hours of live footage from the two-day event for $39.95. As an added bonus, anyone who either purchased a ticket or buys the programming on TV will receive a free in-game companion for World of Warcraft: Grunty the Murloc Marine. This demand for tickets isn't something new; in fact, last year Blizzard went through some frustrating site problems due to the massive number of people trying to purchase tickets. This year's event takes place at the Anaheim Convention Center, from August 21-22. 
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| Two Blizzard releases in 2010, company coy on specifics
August 7, 2009 at 10:20 am
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|   The press is still dissecting every inch of the Activision Blizzard financial call that made the StarCraft 2 delay into 2010 official, but one question stuck out in my head while I was listening in. Activision Blizzard has said in the past that we can expect one major release from Blizzard a year, so with StarCraft 2 being released in 2010, will we get two?
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| FCC wants real answers from ISPs on broadband investment
August 7, 2009 at 9:17 am
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|   Yes, we know—when the FCC puts out a press release (PDF) titled "Columbia Institute for Tele-Information to Conduct Independent Review of Telecom Capital Expenditures to Assist FCC," the eyeballs begin to glaze and the limbs feel suddenly heavy. But this one's worth rousing the brain for, because the FCC announcement means that the agency is taking a close look at just how much investment ISPs make in their broadband lines. The FCC's National Broadband Plan is due to Congress next February, and the agency just launched the first of its 20 different staff-led workshops into all aspects of US broadband. The FCC is looking beyond its walls, too, already commissioning studies about worldwide broadband deployment and usage from Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society (of which Charles Nesson, the Harvard Law professor who recently represented file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum, was a cofounder).
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| Crowdsourcing the semantics of numbers with True #
August 7, 2009 at 7:11 am
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|   Words have obvious meanings to most users, and even when knowledge fails, there's an obvious method to compensate: look it up. Numbers also have semantic values, but they're a lot harder to work with. Most of us can probably recognize 3.14159 and the conceptual baggage it carries, but how many of us would recognize 58.44? (That's a mole of sodium chloride, in grams, for the curious.) And the response that would work for words—look it up—doesn't work so conveniently for numbers. Only one of the top-10 hits in Google refers to salt, and Bing fails entirely (though it does offer "Women's Sexy Mini Skirts by VENUS"). Clearly, we haven't figured out how to make the Web work for numbers in the same way it does for words. Allen Razdow, who got his start developing MathCad, wants to change that, and he talked to Ars about his attempt, True #. Radzow said he was inspired by all the effort put into the semantic Web, which provides a variety of annotation and data exchange formats for information. The new company is providing a service that allows users to create HTML snippets that link back to a full description of the number; these can be embedded in various document formats, like Word and PDF, and the company is offering plugins for embedding numbers from within Word, Acrobat, Eclipse, and Visual Studio. There will be a public database of numbers made available for free, or firms can pay to host a server for internal figures.
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