Cody Taylor

Getting rid of Windows was easier than I thought!

A European company that sells deep packet inspection hardware has released its final numbers on 2008’s Internet trends. Although some structural changes make the numbers a bit difficult to interpret, it looks like P2P traffic is losing share to web use.

Part II of a fantastic interview. Jack Dorsey speaks about Twitter’s contours as a communications medium, its evolution and how its strong suit — so far, at least — is in exposing the present moment, rather than the past.

Valve’s Gabe Newell gave the keynote address at this year’s Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain (DICE) Summit about the cost of games, the effect of piracy, and how to reach new players. Valve undertook an experiment recently to test how price affected the sales of their popular survival-horror FPS, Left 4 Dead. They Reduced the price by 50% on Steam, which “resulted in a 3000% increase in sales of the game, posting overall sales that beat the title’s original launch performance.” They also tested various other price drops over the holidays, seeing spikes in sales that corresponded well to the size of the discount. This will undoubtedly add to the speculation that game prices have risen too high for the current economic climate. G4TV ran a live blog of Newell’s presentation, providing a few more details.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

draevil writes “BBC News reports that the novel “Skylon” spaceplane design of British firm Reaction Engines has received funding to proceed with its proof-of-concept design for an air-breathing rocket engine. If successful the Sabre rocket engine will be able to take the Skylon with 12 tonnes of cargo from a runway, to orbit and then back to that runway without the need for disposable components or a piggy-back ride on a larger aircraft. Should the design prove viable then it could see first use within ten years.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.