jayintune writes "One of the writers from 2old2play had a chance to sit down with the multiplayer section of Gears Of War for a hands on review after a public screening of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The game comes off as a little less then stellar as the author sites controller issues and game mechanics as having some disappointing flaws." Richard at Aeropause, on the other hand, just loved the game when he played the title in Chicago. "The best thing about Gears though had to be that fact that it was a breeze to pick up and play. The controls were perfect and felt as if they needed no tweaking whatsoever. Moving from cover point to cover point was easy and a lot of fun." At least, if things go badly, the game was 'cheap' to make. Mark Rein of Epic Games is quoted as saying Gears 'only' cost $10 Million to make. While that's still a lot, it's much lower than the $30 Million some companies are claiming is required for next-gen gamemaking.

Jonathan writes "Brad Greenspan says he's the real founder of MySpace, not Tom, and the sale of MySpace to News Corp. was a criminal act. In a nine-chapter report, he describes how this was accomplished by hiding the value of the site from Intermix Media's shareholders." From the article: "How was News Corp able to turn $327 million into $20 billion or more of value within a year? The Myspace/Intermix transaction was so low compared to other internet transactions that it is raising eyebrows by analysts and media everywhere. Everyone seems to be asking how News Corp. got such a good deal. It seems too good to be true! After signing the transaction to buy Myspace & Intermix (but prior to the closing), News Corp. itself even showed how strangely little it had paid for Myspace by immediately paying $3.99 per monthly page view for slow growing comparable IGN. News Corp. paid only .03 cents per monthly page view for the hyper fast growing Myspace. Therefore, we can conclude that the fair value of Myspace was 100x or more what News Corp. paid! "

BobB writes "The U.S. Department of the Interior's inspector general has released a report that says department employees are wasting their taxpayer-funded work time going to prohibited web sites. Some of these sites relate to sex, computer games, gambling and auctions. The study found that almost $2 billion a year in productivity was being lost to these 'excessive indulgences.'" From the article: "Computer-use logs revealed more than 4,732 entries relating to sexually explicit Web sites and gambling sites. Some computers accessed sex sites for 30 to 60 minutes during the test period. More than 1 million log entries were discovered indicating 7,763 Department computer users spent 2,004-plus hours accessing game and auction sites. Extrapolated over the year, that could account for 100,000 lost work hours. Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites."

jizziknight writes "Wired has an article up detailing the many types of in-game advertisements and product placements on the way to future games. Advertisers and developers might actually be starting to think it through, rather than just slapping the company's name on everything. Adidas Basketball will be sponsoring some unlockable 'features' in Electronic Arts' NBA Live 07 on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 that showcase its new 'It Takes 5IVE' slogan. The features include 5 players with special uniforms and an exclusive arena. In Fight Night Round 3, Burger King is sponsoring an unlockable boxer as well as an avatar of The King that joins your entourage when you win a Burger King-sponsored event. There are also a few details about an ad-supported MMOG by Acclaim, in which sponsors offer to buy items for you when you go shopping in the game. Another interesting tid-bit from the article: A comScore survey showed that 'Thirty-seven percent of heavy gamers (those who play games at least 16 hours a week) agreed that featuring actual products or companies in games make the games feel more realistic. About one-third (27 percent) of medium gamers (those who played less than 11 hours per week) agreed that in-game ads can add to a game's realism.' Of course, we've all seen instances where ads make the game less realistic."

endychavez writes "Executives and politicians may be starting to realize that privacy is dead and secrets can no longer be kept in the information age. There is always a technological trail, and transparency is pervasive. Just ask Patricia Dunn and Mark Foley. In a piece at eWeek, Ed Cone from CIO Insight talks about the specific technologies that brought them down." From the article: "Foley may have thought his IMs were disappearing into the ether as soon as they cleared his computer screen. Instead, the messages were saved, and his career was ruined, and the House leadership is left to fight for survival. We talk a lot a about transparency as a virtue in the age of the web, and hold it up as a marketing technique and a better way to run an enterprise. Sun's blogging CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is lobbying the SEC to allow more financial information to be disclosed online. Corporations are using all manner of web-techs to speak more directly to stakeholders. But transparency needs to be understood as more than a slogan or a strategy. It's a reality. It can be imposed on you by the Internet, whether you want to be transparent or not."

Wowzer writes "MTV's Overdrive game site show G-Hole got a preview of Guitar Hero II for the PS2. MTV wasn't supposed to share the song names they saw, though, and they were quick to remove the new song names from the video. Lucky for us all 38 Guitar Hero II songs were captured at VideoGamesBlogger. From the article: 'Opening Licks: Strutter — Kiss, Mother — Danzig, Monkey Wrench — Foo Fighters, Shout At The Devil — Motley Crue, Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight — Spinal Tap.'" The article points out that between the songs listed here and previously announced tracks, there are only two songs as yet unrevealed.

Over at Gamasutra, they have details on commentary by Peter Molyneux during the London Games Summit. Speaking in the grandiose, pie-in-the-sky manner he's become known for, Mr. Molyneux described some experimental gameplay ideas they're hoping might someday make it into Fable 2. From the article: "Elements of design that are changing from Fable's development to Fable 2's are what the players can purchase and own (wealth is likely to play a large part in Fable 2's characters); the responsiveness of and fantastical quality of combat (Fable 2 hopes to keep the combat more dramatic than realistic, but more responsive to objects and locations around the player); and the range of experience the player can have (Fable 2 is aiming to allow the main character to become pregnant, give birth, and raise a child)." The leader of Lionhead Studios also spoke on the business side of indie game development, warning developers not to enter the 'spiral of doom': using payment from a contract for a new game to finish development of one already in production. From that article: "Another key point: 'Every game says something about your company', as it was noted: 'You're only as good as your last game' - the industry has a relatively short memory, and signing subsequent titles is vital to indie developers' livelihoods." Update: 10/05 21:43 GMT by Z : Whether or not it contains any of these experimental ideas, at least Microsoft now has its hands on some playable areas of Fable 2.

M00NIE writes "Best Buy has announced it's going to join forces with Real and SanDisk to launch a new online music store. The new technology apparently makes use of Sansa music players that support Rhapsody DNA subscriptions." From the article: "As far as technical details go, Best Buy's new service is going to be identical to Rhapsody's current offering of WMA-protected audio files with the additional features provided by Rhapsody DNA. Rhapsody DNA is based on Real's Helix DRM and gives users the ability to access their content across different types of devices, and provides what RealNetworks describes as an "end-to-end music experience" similar to the closed ecosystem approach that Apple uses and Microsoft will be using with the Zune."

JesusQuintana asks: "I'm working with a low-power television station to update their playback system. Currently they're using tape and I've been tasked to move them to computerized playback (MPEG-2, etc.) There are proprietary solutions (very expensive) and there are companies that bundle software with Windows and standard x86 hardware. Overall, they are generally unimpressive and won't sell the software without bundling it with their own hardware. (They won't let us buy our own storage.) We have the expertise to build our own infrastructure (NAS, redundancy, etc.), but really just need the equivalent of iTunes for high quality video. There are lots of other pieces needed to complete the work-flow (such as encoding the media), which could be accomplished on Mac or Windows or even Linux. But what about playback? We need something that will play back these files at their scheduled times (perhaps scheduling cron jobs to change playlists) to broadcast quality hardware (SDI or YUV video). Could we run a TV station on Linux?"

The Opposable Thumbs column has commentary today from some managers who attended the annual EB/Gamestop preview event. The reaction from the attendees to the PS3/Blue-ray presence is not inspiring. From the article: "The difference between HD DVD and Blu-Ray was striking as well. 'Blu-ray had a tiny presence in the very back of the show floor, while Microsoft had large displays and surround sound systems in their hospitality suite so you can take a look at what their HD DVD drives would look like. It was impressive, and gave the feeling that HD DVD was real and Blu-ray wasn't ready for the show.' I asked him his feelings going into the PS3 launch with no word on allocations or preorders, and no news on what will happen towards the holidays. 'It's going to be ugly, there is no way this launch is going to go well.'"

prostoalex writes "The October issue of Wired magazine takes a look at Ray Ozzie's work with Microsoft. To hear the article describe it, he's rebuilding the company from the ground up. A 70,000-employee company is quietly changing its ways by thinking of software as deliverable services that perhaps could be rented on a monthly subscription basis." From the article: "There are, of course, two major reasons for Ozzie's ascendancy at Microsoft: Gates and Ballmer. Ozzie is one of the few technologists anywhere whom they respect; they'd been trying for years to get him to join the company. Now he's carrying their hopes for the future, and it's a heavy load. Ozzie needs to move Microsoft from selling software in a box to selling lightning-fast, powerful online applications ranging from gaming to spreadsheets. The risks are enormous. The mission is to radically alter the way the company sells its most profitable software and to pursue the great unknown of so-called Web services - trading an old cash cow for an as-yet-to-be-determined cash cow. No, Microsoft doesn't think its customers will stop using PCs with hard drives and work entirely online, but the desktop era is drawing to a close, and that promises to force some painful trade-offs."

simoniker writes "Wal-Mart game buyer Steve Perry discusses the U.S retail giant's approach to stocking both current-gen and next-gen consoles, including pricing, launch supply flow, and the availability of demo units for Wii and PlayStation 3. Perry also updates on what's been hot in Wal-Mart stores this summer: 'We've been really successful with Madden, that's been really good. NCAA has been great. Guitar Hero's been on fire. The new DS Lite, the colors came out a few weeks ago, those have done really well.'"

mikesd81 writes, "The AP has an article on PhishTank, OpenDNS's service for fighting e-mail fraud. The free service seeks to tap the wisdom of the Internet community in identifying phishing emails and sites." From the article: "Users simply submit to PhishTank.com the messages they believe are scams. Others then examine the message and the site to which it links and decide whether it is or isn't a scam. When an item gets enough votes and the margin is wide enough, it is either dropped or classified as a phishing message. To prevent scammers from trying to game the system, votes are weighed based on how long, how often, and how accurate one has rated other messages." Update: 10/05 18:24 GMT by kd : David Ulevitch wrote to mention: "PhishTank, unlike any other anti-phishing service, provides a full API and open access to the data for any developer to use to secure their applications. Before PhishTank, someone from the SpamAssassin project or maybe the Squid Cache would have to fork over a lot of money for phishing data to groups like the Anti Phishing Working Group or Symantec. It's now available for free, and I believe in a far more accurate and usable form."

Krishna Dagli writes to tell us of an investigation, by Michael Sutton, attempting to get an estimate of how widespread SQL-injection vulnerabilities are among Web sites. Sutton made clever use of the Google API to turn up candidate vulnerable sites. You might quibble with his methodology (some posters on the blog site do), but he found that around 11% of sites are potentially vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. He believes the causes for this somewhat alarming situation include development texts that teach programmers insecure SQL syntax, and point-and-click tools that allow the untrained to put up database-backed sites.

jeffsenter writes, "The Washington Post has the story: 'NASA scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered what they believe are 16 new planets deep in the Milky Way, leading them to conclude there are probably billions of planets spread throughout the galaxy.' What sets these potential planets apart is they are in the central bulge of the Milky Way where most stars are located. More planets in the galaxy means more chances for life." The 16 are planet candidates at this point, until verified by spectroscopic measurement of their parent stars' wobbles, which probably can't be done until the James Webb Space Telescope files in 2013.