C&VG offers up some news on Microsoft's next-gen games platform today. Most interesting are comments from Peter Moore indicating the company will be refocusing on fun, inspired by the financial and mass-market success of Nintendo's Wii. Says Moore "From a first-party point of view, it's not just about E-rated games, it's going to be about the experience that, quite frankly, Nintendo has done a tremendous job in capturing, in bringing back fun - if you will - to the gaming platforms." He's quick to point out that this is something they've had on the back burner for some time, and they intend to aim for 'experiential' games. The article wonders out loud, questioning whether this means Microsoft is planning to roll out a motion-sensing controller, or just more E and T rated games? Additionally, CVG points out that this week's Xbox Live Arcade release is The Behemoth's Alien Hominid . It's a tremendous side-scrolling 2d shooter, and well worth checking out.

mattaw writes "The Register is carrying the sanest and balanced article on Windows deployment in UK warships that I have read to date in the public domain. As an ex-naval bod myself we have long considered that this is potentially a REAL problem. The main issues are the huge amount of unrelated code that is imported with the kernel and the need for incredibly fast response times."

The launch of the BitTorrent Entertainment Network came out today; there's the AP write-up, which is decent enough but the interview with Bram about it is more interesting. Tangentially, the the education of lawmakers on video DRM is an interesting countweight to all this.

Pelly writes "For those who are interested in seeing the inner-workings of Dell's latest XPS M1710 flagship notebook, Hot Hardware has taken the time to rip the system apart and photograph the hardware for your viewing pleasure. In addition, there's some amusing overclocking attempts which utilize the sub-zero temperatures of New Hampshire's winter weather to provide an interesting spin on the review."

MattSparkes writes "The ESA's Rosetta probe swooped around Mars on Sunday, completing a key manoeuvre in its 10-year mission to land on a distant comet. The 3-tonne probe came within 155 miles of the planet's surface, and took some incredible images that reveal cloud systems on the planet. "At this time of the Martian year, a large fraction of Mars' atmosphere is evaporating from the southern polar cap and will migrate to the northern polar cap during nothern winter. Over most of the Martian disk one can see large cloud systems.""

The Firehose brought us a link from the NYTimes about Quigo. As the Times feed says: "Yahoo and Google are facing a challenge from a tiny adversary named Quigo Technologies over contextual text ads online." And while obviously not in the same financial league, it is good to see more competition in this space.

An anonymous reader writes "Bloggers have been buzzing about the new wave of "Web 2.0" campaign sites, but it seems that a lot of presidential candidates haven't bothered to protect themselves from cross-site scripting attacks. A blogger has found a collection of XSS vulnerabilities including the websites of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, John Cox, Newt Gingrich, Tom Tancredo, the Democratic National Committee, and even a surprise from Whitehouse.gov. Some of the holes are low-risk, but others would allow a user's accounts on the affected website to be compromised. A victim would simply have to click on a maliciously crafted link that appears to lead to the candidate's site."

Roland Piquepaille writes "If you live near the sea, chances are high that your home is built over sandy soil. And if an earthquake strikes, deep and sandy soils can turn to liquid with disastrous consequences for the buildings built above them. Now, US researchers have found a way to use bacteria to steady buildings against earthquakes by turning these sandy soils into rocks. 'Starting from a sand pile, you turn it back into sandstone,' the chief researcher explained. It is already possible to inject chemicals into the ground to reinforce it, but this technique can have toxic effects on soil and water. In contrast, the use of common bacteria to 'cement' sands has no harmful effects on the environment. So far this method is limited to labs and the researchers are working on scaling their technique. Here are more references and a picture showing how unstable ground can aggravate the consequences of an earthquake."

Verunks writes "Microsoft Word users now can easily import and export to the OpenDocument Format. The StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview, a plug-in for Microsoft Word 2003 that allows users of Microsoft Word 2003 to read, edit and save to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is now available"

An anonymous reader writes "Creative Commons announced the release of its licenses on Friday 23 Feb 2007. Changes include "Clarifications Negotiated With Debian and MIT", CC-BY-SA "compatibility structure", endorsement control, etc."

Vista's User Account Control, love it or hate it, represents a barrier against unwanted software getting run on users' computers. A Symantec researcher has found a simple way to spoof UAC and says that it shouldn't be completely trusted. The trick is to disguise the UAC warning dialog in the color associated with alerts generated by Windows itself.

An anonymous reader writes "VMWare released a white paper detailing its concerns with license changes on Microsoft software that may limit the ability to move virtual-machine software around data centers to automate the management of computing work. Two choice quotes: '"Microsoft is looking for any way it can to gain the upper hand," said Diane Greene, the president of VMware.' And, '"This seems to be a far more subtle, informed and polished form of competitive aggression than we've seen from Microsoft in the past," said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University. "And Microsoft has no obligation to facilitate a competitor."'"