Cody Taylor

oldwindways writes “An Ohio teen was found guilty of murdering his mother and shooting his father in the head after they took away his copy of Halo 3. One has to wonder if this is going to have any effect on the games industry. Clearly, the AP thought they could stir up something controversial by asking the IP owner for a statement: ‘Microsoft, which owns the intellectual property for the game, declined to comment beyond a statement saying: “We are aware of the situation and it is a tragic case.”‘ I suppose the good news is they did not accept his insanity plea, so no one can claim that Halo 3 drove him insane. Even so, I don’t think anything good can come out of this for gamers.” Unfortunately, it seems somebody can claim that the game was a contributing factor; the judge who presided over this case said he believes that the 17-year-old defendant “had no idea at the time he hatched this plot that if he killed his parents, they would be dead forever.” GamePolitics has further details from the judge’s statement. It doesn’t help that the boy’s lawyers used video game addiction as a defense.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While Microsoft has basic Windows Live counterparts to all iLife applications, it didn’t have an application to compete with GarageBand that lets users easily record a song and write music. A new Microsoft Research project unveiled at the CES 2009 finally completes the missing musical link – Songsmith.

dhavleak writes “Microsoft Research has come up with Microsoft Tag: ‘…just aim your camera phone at a Tag and instantly access mobile content, videos, music, contact information, maps, social networks, promotions, and more. Nothing to type, no browsers to launch!’ Device support is fairly extensive (iPhone, WinMo, BlackBerry and more), and tag scanning appears to work quickly and reliably from different distances and angles. Long Zheng has an overview on his site. The Tag is similar to a barcode, but has obvious visual differences — colored vs. black and white, and triangles vs. squares or lines. The technology looks interesting, but will it get the adoption necessary to be successful? What applications do you see for such technology?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft announced the Windows 7 beta at CES last week, and Ars has been using it since the moment it became available. Here’s an in-depth look at the current state of the next version of Windows.