Cody Taylor

A recent shooting in Germany has raised the ire of many politicians and officials, and they’re turning to video games as a scapegoat after it was revealed that the shooter was a fan of Counterstrike and played Far Cry 2 the night before the rampage. First, a major retailer decided to drop mature-rated games altogether, and then the Minister for Social Affairs suggested restricting “addictive games,” such as World of Warcraft, to adults only. Despite an unfavorable reaction from gamers and game developers alike, the chief of Germany’s national police union has now spoken out against violent games as well, saying, “The world would be no poorer if there were no more killergames.”

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An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft, inspired perhaps by the ease of selecting and installing iPhone apps, has taken a similar approach to gather back market share of its IIS web server in a predominantly Apache/PHP market. 10 open source CMS, gallery, wiki, and blog tools were chosen to populate the eco-system, dubbed Web App Gallery. Developers must agree to principles and can now submit their PHP or .NET application for inclusion. Once an application is in the gallery, Windows users use Microsoft Web Platform Installer, released in a keynote at MIX this week, which inspects the the local system, and installs and configures dependencies like the IIS webserver, PHP, URL re-writers, and file permissions. Screenshots show this to be quite easy for the typical computer user. This could provide some real competition for WAMP and Linux shell install processes.”

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Slatterz writes “A decade ago people were talking about the death of distance, and how the internet would make physical geography irrelevant. This has not come to pass; there are still places around the world that are hubs of technology just as there are for air travel, product manufacturing or natural resource exploitation. This list of the ten best IT centres of excellence includes some interesting trivia about Station X during the Second World War, why Romania is teeming with software developers, Silicon Valley, Fort Meade Maryland, and Zhongguancun in China, where Microsoft is building its Chinese headquarters.”

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Mike Chapman points out this InfoWorld article, according to which you shouldn’t immediately expect much in the way of performance gains from Windows 7 (or Linux) from eight-core chips that come out from Intel this year. “For systems going beyond quad-core chips, the performance may actually drop beyond quad-core chips. Why? Windows and Linux aren’t designed for PCs beyond quad-core chips, and programmers are to blame for that. Developers still write programs for single-core chips and need the tools necessary to break up tasks over multiple cores. Problem? The development tools aren’t available and research is only starting.”

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Houston 2600 sends this excerpt from the Register about an open-source security assessment tool Microsoft presented at CanSecWest: “Microsoft on Friday released an open-source program designed to streamline the labor-intensive process of identifying security vulnerabilities in software while it’s still under development. As its name suggests, !exploitable Crash Analyzer (pronounced ‘bang exploitable crash analyzer’) combs through bugs that cause a program to seize up, and assesses the likelihood of them being exploited by attackers. Dan Kaminsky, a well-known security expert who also provides consulting services to Microsoft, hailed the release a ‘game changer’ because it provides a reliable way for developers to sort through thousands of bugs to identify the several dozen that pose the greatest risk.”

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he iPhone 3.0 software includes the ability to copy-and-paste, a landscape keyboard, and push notifications. However, none of these updates were as revolutionary as the new features Apple offered to iPhone application developers. The one to watch however is the ability to purchase items within an application.

darthcamaro writes “For nearly three years, Oracle has had its own version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, claiming the two versions are essentially the same thing. But are they really? As it turns out, there are a few things on which Oracle and Red Hat do not see eye-to-eye, including file systems and virtualization. The article quotes Wim Coekaerts, Oracle’s director of Linux engineering, saying, ‘A lot of people think Oracle is doing Enterprise Linux as just basically a rip off of Red Hat but that’s not what this is about. … This is about a support program, and wanting to offer quality Linux OS support to customers that need it. The Linux distribution part is there just to make sure people can get a freely available Linux operating system that is fully supported.'”

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A software company could potentially lose more than half a million dollars because of an iPhone app that Apple has ignored for six months.

An anonymous reader writes “I hate my career of the past few years. For a long time I’ve wondered what I’d do after I broke even and could get into something new, and I keep coming back to computers. I’d like to get into software, since I always enjoyed coding. I have some background with C++ so I’m not starting entirely from scratch. My problem is my degrees and past employment have no practical application to the field. Where should I start? I have friends in both IT and software development who might be able to pull some strings and get me an interview or two for entry-level positions, but what can I do to make myself hireable in a short period of time? Is it possible to pick up enough of what I’d need within a couple months? If so, what and how?”

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Publicly-traded Tencent, a leading Chinese web portal, instant message client, social network, game developer and more has exceeded billion in revenue in a single year. Tencent has done this through the use of virtual goods and other “Internet valued-added services,” like avatars, online memberships, music and community sites.