slashflood writes "Rockstar has unexpectedly closed its Rockstar Vienna development office, particularly known for its Grand Theft Auto Xbox conversion, laying off more than 100 employees. Confirmation has come in the form of a weblog post by Rockstar Vienna employee Jurie Horneman: 'This morning, as I came into work, I was greeted by security guards. It turned out Take-Two has closed their Rockstar Vienna office, effective immediately, 'due to the challenging environment facing the video game business and our Company during this platform transition'.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Justice Department has added another two years to its agreement with Microsoft, extending the protocol licensing program that is part of the company's penance for anti-competitive activities. The organization feels Microsoft is providing documentation too slowly to its licensees." From the article: "At one time, the Justice Department and several state Attorneys General had sought a breakup of Microsoft in order to prevent it from abusing its Windows monopoly. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson at one point ordered such a move, though his ruling was later reversed on appeal. Ultimately Microsoft settled with the Department of Justice, agreeing to far more modest restrictions, including the protocol licensing program." Relatedly, regulators have cleared Vista of anti-competitive elements. They examined the OS on concerns an added search box may have given the company a home-field advantage.

Kate Thompson writes "Alice Taylor at Wonderland writes that BBC Radio 1 is coming to Second Life, with a virtual festival and simulcast this weekend to coincide with Radio 1's One Big Weekend event. Second Life users can catch live performances in-game by acts including Muse, Razorlight and Gnarls Barkley. Pitchforkmedia.com also reported on the rise of live music in Second Life a couple of weeks ago, focusing on the launch of Muse Isle and the swarms of coffeehouse performers playing covers every night in-game."

theodp asks: "From Rotwang in Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Wallace the Engineer in last year's Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Slate notes that scientists have long been a staple of the movies. So who are some of the more memorable scientist characters from your movie-going?"

A not-so-anonymous reader asks: "I am about to buy a new cell phone and my primary focus is on good reception quality, as I have bad network coverage at home. I made some tests using some phones I have access to and got a subjective rating of T610 < K500i < 6520 < V600i, where T610 means 'nearly no service' and V600i gives 'service even in the wine cellar'. Googling around did not give any useful hints. Has anyone compared the reception quality of current GSM phones via simple locations testing, or better yet with commercial GSM testing equipment?"

Vitaly Friedman writes "Yahoo defends its policies in China as doing more good than harm, even as multiple dissidents have been jailed based on Yahoo Mail evidence. From the article: 'Yahoo continues to defend itself against charges that its Chinese operations have been responsible for the jailing of multiple dissidents. Multiple reports have surfaced which tie Yahoo Mail to various Chinese court cases that have ended in imprisonment for writers with politically unpopular opinions.'"

Red Herring is covering an indie game panel held this week at E3, at which Warren Spector essentially told independent game developers to just give up now. From the article: "Fellow panelists echoed Mr. Spector's sentiments, telling a room full of game company representatives, industry consultants, and members of the media that the path to entering the $7-billion market is fraught with more pitfalls than Tomb Raider. While opportunities do exist, small companies and startups find it difficult to secure funding and distribution for their work. They often have to deal with past projects that pigeonhole them and potentially hamper future expansion."

Gamespot has a hands-on with the virtual console for the Wii. From the article: "Nintendo's Wii Virtual Console demo station featured five signature games from system's past: Super Mario Bros. from the NES, Super Mario World from the SNES, Super Mario 64 from the Nintendo 64, Sonic the Hedgehog from the Sega Genesis, and Bonk's Adventure from the TurboGrafix 16. The navigation menu only allowed us to scroll through the five title selection pages, so we didn't get a chance to select and download games to run."

simoniker writes "Talking to the Japanese press, Sony executive Izumi Kawanishi has illuminated some of his company's PlayStation 3 Linux plans, indicating that it will be possible for individual 'homebrew' coders to create playable content for PS3, something actively blocked for Sony's PSP handheld. He commented: "Other then game studios tied to official developer licenses, we'd like to see various individuals participate in content creation for the PS3"."

conq writes "BusinessWeek looks at the flaws in the bill proposed by the House of Representatives that would block access to social networks and Internet chat rooms in most federally funded schools and libraries. One big problem with their bill is it is much too vague, it 'could rule out content from any number of Internet companies, including Yahoo! and Google.' What's more, DOPA would prohibit sites that enable users to create their own content and share it. That covers a wide swath of the online world, known colloquially as Web 2.0, where users actively create everything from blogs to videos to news-page collections." This is analysis of a bill we covered yesterday.

The 360 is playing host to some non-traditional titles in the near future. Huxley is an MMO, one of the first on the console, and combines MMORPG elements with FPS shooting. From Gamespot's Huxley hands-on: "We saw a residential area that has room for 5,000 players, and told that you'll be able to purchase your own housing in the game." Meanwhile, Mass Effect is Bioware's next great opus, an RPG with energy weapons. From 1up's Mass Effect hands-on: "Everything for the E3 demo was in-engine, and the graphics are impressive. The dialogue scenes revealed characters with lifelike eye movements that conveyed real emotion. Excellent voice acting, distinctive music, and a beautifully formed world with rich, detailed environments show real promise."

Tough Lefty writes "A new study by McAfee's SiteAdvisor Web ratings finds that sponsored results from some of the biggest names in the search engine business contain spyware, spam, scams and other Internet menaces. The key findings were that major search engines returned risky sites in their search results for popular keywords and sponsored results contained two to four times as many dangerous sites as organic results. Overall, MSN search results had the lowest percentage (3.9%) of dangerous sites while Ask search results had the highest percentage (6.1%). Google was in between (5.3%). Check the comprehensive study for all the data."

Jay Cruise writes "The world's first 3D gaming mouse was unveiled at the 2006 E3 Expo. The Game O' 3D gaming mouse offers PC gamers an 'unfair advantage' by allowing them to execute moves that are not possible using just a keyboard and a traditional 2D mouse. For example, in FPS, Game O' offers gamers a way to move forward, backwards, sideways, jump, crouch, pitch, yaw and roll without using the keyboard." For a more cynical opinion, I submit to you Ars Technica's take on the device. From that piece: "Your head just explodes. It's a terrible thing, and the nub on the side for some reason randomly makes you crouch. The man showing me the product was quick to add that you could set up the controls however you wanted. The software to do this even looked nice. This doesn't help the fact that playing a first person shooter with one hand is a bad idea. You'd still need a hand free to like, you know, reload? You could probably use those buttons, but in the demo they were set to look up and down. What if you're playing a game where you can peek around corners? You simply need the keyboard."

Billosaur writes "From NPR, we get a Marketplace story about the theft of corporate laptops and the sensitive data they may contain, specifically how to handle the repercussions. From the story: 'TriWest operates in about 21 states. It's based in Phoenix, Arizona. In December of 2002, somebody broke into the company's offices and stole two computer hard drives.And those hard drives contained the personal information of 550,000 of our customers from privates in the military all the way up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.' How they handled the situation earned them an award from the Public Relations Society of America."

jbeaupre writes "Groklaw has spawned a new feature that may prove useful well beyond the current SCO litigation. The UNIX Methods and Concepts Database began as a list of books and papers on Groklaw that became so large it demanded organization. The new system was announced and is currently a work in progress."