by Mike Bantick

The combination of Xbox 360 with a Nintendo Wii can become a gaming Nirvana for some, has the Sony crown been dislodged?

With new value packs and the addition of the HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360, coupled with the sheer enjoyment of the Wii experience, it may be that the PlayStation 3 will find it difficult to settle into a market niche.

Sure there is the loyal PlayStation fan base, and those that see the PS3 for its obvious advantage bullet points over the other machines.

• Hard drive capacity.
• Back catalogue of excellent games.
• Cutdown Linux capabilities.
• Blu-ray drive.

Sheer power, yet to be exploited by game developers. This will most likely be fully exploited by the development of exclusive PlayStation titles.

In the gaming sphere however, for the bulk of punters the argument will come down to the gaming experience.

As it stands at the moment, Sony are up against two competing consoles that (for the a similar price point) can boast a years head start on high definition gaming, and a unique play mechanism (wii-mote) that is quite
simply fun.

Now we hear reports of some of the PlayStation 3 faithful trading in their newly acquired consoles for Nintendo Wii’s, one has to start getting a little concerned for the future of the Sony gaming franchise Behemoth.

I believe the PS3 is a superb piece of technology (not here commercially in Australia until March 2007), yet I find it hard to believe it could replace the smiles I saw on the faces of my family over these recent holidays.

My five year old Daughter was able to pick up and play baseball on Wii sports, after creating her own Mii through the Wii channel specifically available for gamers to create a simple on-screen avatar of themselves.

In a similar vein I also witnessed my Father, pushing Sixty Five years old and suffering from the debilitating Parkinson’s disease for over a decade, step up to the Wii and give the AI tennis players a run for their money. I could not get the bugga away from the screen all weekend. Now, my Mother is being bugged by him to get his own console, just like a big kid.

This of course is Nintendo’s aim, to widen the demographic of gamers. This vision is materialising fantastically for the big N, even given the problems with snapping controller wrist straps.

Sony will need to pull out all stops to counter the Wii roller coaster. Teamed with an Xbox 360 for a more hardcore gaming experience, the PS3 will be up against it during the initial rounds of the console war.

If anybody can emerge on top, it is Sony. The PS2 will help in this endeavour as it continues to provide solid sales. The PSP might also play a role in maintaining the PlayStation brand at the top.

Like Nintendo though, it will require some inspired brain storming sessions at Sony HQ.

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Adobe may already own the market for electronic documents thanks to PDF, but the company knows that Microsoft has a habit of showing up late to the party and stealing the crown. In turn, Adobe is beta testing a new project it calls “Mars,” which is an answer to Microsoft’s new XPS format.

XPS, formerly known as Metro, is an XML-based “electronic paper” format that will allow documents to be displayed as they were saved on any platform. Many of the features of XPS mirror those in PDF, and Microsoft is working with printer manufacturers to include native support for the format - much like Adobe PostScript.

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Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 is an early developer milestone for the next major version of Firefox that is being built on top of the next generation of Mozilla’s layout engine, Gecko 1.9.
While an Alpha version of Firefox 3 (Gran Paradiso) Alpha 1 is available for download, this release is not meant for public consumption, only for testing.

Gecko 1.9 Alpha 1 introduces several new features which can be tested by using Gran Paradiso Alpha 1:

• Cairo is now being used as the default graphics library, affecting all graphic and text rendering
• Cocoa Widgets are now used in OS X builds
• An updated threading model
• Changes to how web pages are painted
• New SVG elements and filters, and improved SVG specification compliance

Firefox 3 will no longer support operating systems like Windows 95, 98 and ME or Macintosh OS X 10.2.

Firefox 3 Download

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Download Google Web Toolkit

BitTorrent, Inc. has taken the next step — the acquisition of uTorrent. In a joint announcement made today, the two firms have publicly solidified the merger. ‘Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and uTorrent AB have decided to join forces … BitTorrent has acquired uTorrent as it recognized the merits of uTorrent’s exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together uTorrent’s efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent’s expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.

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A malicious video on MySpace.com pages changes people’s profiles when played, embedding itself and adding links to fraudulent Web sites, experts have warned.

The video is a rigged QuickTime file that exploits a MySpace vulnerability and support for JavaScript in Apple Computer’s embedded media player, Web security firm Websense said in an alert posted on Friday.

When played by a MySpace user, the video adds itself to the user’s MySpace page and replaces the links on the user’s profile with links to phishing Web sites, Websense said. Phishing sites are fraudulent sites that attempt to trick people into giving up sensitive information such as log-in credentials.

A MySpace representative on Monday said she could not immediately comment on the worm.

MySpace, owned by News Corp., is a popular social-networking Web site that is estimated to have more than 70 million registered users. The worm exploits a common type of Web vulnerability called a cross-site scripting flaw in the site along with a feature called HREF track in QuickTime that has legitimate uses but can also be abused, experts said.

“It seems that we have a MySpace worm on our hands, using a malicious QuickTime MOV file to spread,” Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at security company F-Secure, wrote in a blog posting Saturday.

The rigged QuickTime movie includes some JavaScript code that will be run automatically when an infected page is viewed with Internet Explorer, Hypponen wrote. This snippet of code modifies the user’s MySpace profile. “After that, everybody who visits your MySpace profile gets hit too,” he wrote.

The same happens when viewing an infected page with Firefox, according to a CNET News.com reader who had his MySpace profile compromised.

The object of the attack appears to get people to visit the phishing Web sites. These pages are crafted to look like MySpace log-in pages and prompt users to enter their MySpace credentials, according to F-Secure.
This is not the first threat to hit MySpace. Miscreants have exploited the popularity of the Web site before to steal personal information and to spread adware. Also, some MySpace users have exploited weaknesses in the site to boost their fame.Experts have warned that as Web sites are becoming more interactive, security needs to be to be top-of-mind, not an afterthought. The development momentum for many sites is all about features, with protections being neglected, they have said.

An infected MySpace page will include links to the fraudulent Web sites and a blue navigation bar that is not typically found on MySpace pages, according to researchers at FaceTime Security Labs.

“If this is the case, you will need to clean out your profile and check if any of your friends have also been infected,” Chris Boyd, director of malware research at FaceTime, wrote in a blog post.

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by Gail Sober

Many of the so called search engine optimization experts strongly suggest only trading links with other sites that have a high page rank. While this itself is probably a great suggestion if you are only focusing on building your sites page rank.

But what about traffic?

Let’s be realistic here for a minute. Where do you expect your site to show up in the search engines? The number one spot? Top ten? First page of the results? Your chances of winning the lottery are probably better, especially for highly competitive keywords.

Just to take a look at what you are up against, I did a few quick searches for some popular keywords.

home business - about 2,930,000,000 home based business - about 618,000,000 make money - about 269,000,000 ebay - about 798,000,000 work from home - about 2,090,000,000

As you can see, you are up against a lot of other webmasters who have the same desire as you… achieving top search engine results for their keywords. This is some very stiff competition to say the very least. Many of the search engine optimization experts own or manage hundreds and even thousands of websites in their networks which they can use to easily manipulate a new websites page rank by pointing links at it as well as a number of other methods which many of us just do not have the resources available to compete with them.

Now, what happens if and when you do hit the Google Lottery and land that top spot on the search engines? I’ll tell you and I speak from experience. Your page is now under severe scrutiny. Unethical webmasters are directly copying your page and resubmitting as their own. Ethical webmasters are using a variety of tools to completely pick apart and analyze your page to see what they can do to take your spot. And the cycle continues.

While the top page results on the search engines can definitely send some traffic your way, what kind of traffic would you receive if you turned the focus of your efforts away from trading links with only search engine optimization in mind and instead concentrated on getting as much exposure for your site as possible? You could easily start seeing the traffic to your site from these link exchanges outperform anything you could realistically expect to achieve from mediocre search engine placement.

Another overlooked aspect of this strategy is that while you are exchanging links with as many other sites as possible now and even though many of these sites will have low page rank now, what about six months from now or even one or two years from now. You can expect that many of these other sites will have their page rank increased over time and now those pr1 and pr2 sites you started out linking to could now be pr3, pr4 and pr5 and lucky you, you have hundreds or thousands of these linked to you. And the best part of it all is, it is a permanent and low maintainance traffic source. You are not in a cycle of competition as you are in the search engines trying to not only get a top spot but to keep that top spot once you’ve gotten it.

Maybe you are not ready to completely give up on your search engine efforts but can see the possibilities in what I’ve described above. What should you do? Why not just give it a try and compare the results? Domain names are cheap, set up a second site and only use the method above and then compare your traffic logs for the two sites and see which one is providing more traffic and sales.

When looking for sites to exchange links with, obviously you would want to start with sites that compliment your sites services or products. As an example, if you sold ladies hats then you might want to start looking for trades with sites that sold ladies purses, shoes or belts. While that is a good place to start, do not overlook the fact that any link from any site is a possible sale for you. Just because someone is at a site looking at tractors or pet supplies doesn’t mean that they may not be interested in your product or service so don’t hesitate to initiate trades with sites of all types.

The final part of this is … follow through. One thing I have noticed in my ten plus years in internet marketing is that everyone is waiting for someone else to make the first move and this is especially true in link exchanges. You offer to trade links with someone and they reply with a link and tell you to add your link first. Make the first move! You will get much further asking rather than waiting to be asked.

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