"The Sims" to move from PC screen to silver screen
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Maybe they can call it "The Sims:  The Movie." Electronic Arts Inc.  has sold the movie  rights for "The Sims," the best-selling computer game, of all  time to 20th Century Fox, Variety said on Friday.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft held another dog-and-pony show Friday to tout its prized Silverlight rich media technology, which will take on Adobe's ubiquitous Flash Player for the hearts and minds of developers. The company's ReMix07 event, held at company offices in Mountain View, Calif, was a slimmed-down replay of the larger Mix07 conference held in Las Vegas in April. Featured were demonstrations of Silverlight benefits for Internet browsers, leveraged with Microsoft's Expression and the Visual Studio tools. "The core [function] that Siliverlight delivers is rich media capabilities," including video and graphics, said Scott Guthrie, general manager of the developer division at Microsoft. Silverlight, which is still in a pre-release stage, is deployable on Windows and Macintosh via a lightweight download. Net and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming models can be used with it. "Our goal is to have [Silverlight] run on as many systems as possible," Guthrie said. Microsoft wants to see it installed on hundreds of millions of clients. Microsoft officials are bullish on Silverlight, viewing it as having higher quality than Adobe Flash and of great use to venture capital-funded companies looking to provide a differentiated Web experience. "I think Silverlight gives you the richest possible way to watch video on the Web," said Dan'l Lewin, corporate vice president for strategic and emerging business development at Microsoft. "I think that's something that most people in the industry have acknowledged and are pretty excited about." Flash, however, already is installed on more than 700 million Internet-connected desktops, Adobe said. Silverlight technologies currently accessible include the beta release of Silverlight 1.0, which is focused on adding media like graphics to existing Web sites. It is due to be generally available later this summer with a release candidate due soon, Guthrie said. An alpha release of Silverlight 1.1 is also available, geared to rich Internet applications and leveraging .Net programming. Silverlight tools also are planned for the Visual Studio 2008 platform due later this year. Silverlight will be supported on mobile devices and other OSes in the future, Guthrie said. A Linux client version is possible at some point, but Microsoft is focusing on Windows and Macintosh now because they have the largest installed base, Microsoft officials said.Â Â  Featured during this morning's presentation was a demonstration of a Silverlight-based video-editing application developed by Metaliq. With this application, videos could be dragged and dropped onto a palette and edited together. A ReMix attendee saw promise in Silverlight. "It seems like Microsoft is doing what they usually do, [which is] coming out with a tool that really goes over the top and does as much as if not more than what the other competitors do," said Craig Benson, vice president of engineering at InnerAthlete, which is an online athletic training site. InnerAthlete could use Silverlight to show video demonstrations, Benson said.Â  Also at ReMix, Guthrie stressed Windows Presentation Foundation. "It really enables you to build much richer desktop applications and push the boundaries of what the desktop can do," he said. He noted that another item on Microsoft's agenda is the planned Internet Information Services 7 with a rich hosting infrastructure. "This is a major update of our Web server stack," Guthrie said. In a separate, Windows-related development this week, Microsoft offered a "Windows Vista Momentum pack to its OEM partners to promote deployments of Windows Vista. The pack features information on what Microsoft calls "the great momentum and readiness" in the market from the Vista ecosystem.
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Microsoft has reversed course and will now allow Vista users to run a virtual copy of the least expensive versions of the operating system, Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium.
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Tycho:  It's floating around now, out there on the Wub, and it calls to you.  Or maybe it does, I don't actually know.  In any case, it can be got from 3D Downloads, the Fileplanets, GamersHell, or WorthDownloading.  Download it from mulltiple sites simultaneously for a naughty thrill.  God only knows how this would run on my Vista rig at home, but it's a Vista rig, so you can probably guess.  (CW)TB
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The sequel delivers all the stuff that made the original the best-selling game of all time, and adds a couple of nice touches. By the end, though, you realize the new version is just a tuneup of the old. Lore SjÃ¶berg reviews The Sims 2.
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The chip is expected to be unveiled Tuesday, in time to bump up the performance of game desktops before the holidays.
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What originally appeared to be a move by Macrovision to build a rights protection empire surprisingly appears to have lost an essential element: its PC software.
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The clock is ticking: Microsoft will end OEM and shrink-wrapped sales of Windows XP on June 30, 2008, forcing users to shift to Vista. (System builders, meaning those who do white-box PCs, can sell XP through December 31.) Don't let that happen!                                                      Millions of us have grown comfortable with XP and don't see a need to change to Vista. It's like having a comfortable apartment that you've enjoyed coming home to for years, only to get an eviction notice. The thought of moving to a new place -- even with the stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and maple cabinets (or is cherry in this year?) -- just doesn't sit right. Maybe it'll be more modern, but it will also cost more and likely not be as good a fit. And you don't have any other reason to move. That's exactly the conclusion people have come to with Vista. For most of us, there's really no reason to move to it -- yet we don't have a choice. When that strong desire to stick with XP became obvious in spring 2007, major computer makers such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard quietly reintroduced new XP-based systems (but just to business customers, so as not to offend Microsoft).But come June 30, even that option goes away. (See InfoWorld's live XP countdown clock. To use this clock on your own Web site, please e-mail Executive Editor Galen Gruman for the code snippet.)So what to do? Let Microsoft decide where your personal and enterprise software "lives"? Or send a loud and clear message that you don't want to move?We're going for the loud-and-clear option. Join us, and tell Microsoft that you want to keep XP available indefinitely. Not for another six months or a year, but indefinitely. Sign InfoWorld's petition today. And consider submitting a "Save XP" video to our site to help spread the word.And ask your friends and colleagues to join in, too. Just point them to SaveXP.com.Don't think Microsoft will listen? Consider this: Although Microsoft denies that anything is wrong with Vista or that most people don't want it, the company has already postponed XP's demise by six months. That's a start, but it's not good enough.Microsoft doesn't have to admit failure; it can just say it will keep XP available indefinitely due to customer demand. It can take that opportunity to try again with a better Vista, or just move on to the next version that maybe this time we'll all actually want.There is a precedent for that, too: In many respects, Vista is like the Windows Millennium Edition that was meant to replace Windows 98 in 2000 but caused more trouble than it was worth. At that time, Windows 2000 was promising but didn't support a lot of hardware, so users were stuck between two bad choices. Without admitting Millennium's failure, Microsoft quietly put Windows 98 back on the market until the fixed version of Windows 2000 (SP1) was available. Microsoft needs to do something like that again today.Make your voice heard to Microsoft. Sign our petition to save XP today. We will present it to Microsoft.For more on why Vista isn't the right replacement for XP, check out InfoWorld's analyses: The (post-SP1) Vista verdict: Wait for Windows 7 Randall Kennedy's assessment is that for the vast majority of enterprise IT shops, Vista is not -- and likely never will be -- the right choice for their immediate desktop computing needs.Service pack vs. service pack: XP SP3 beats Vista SP1 According to tests by Devil Mountain Software comparing the release candidates for the last Windows XP service pack and the first Vista service pack, XP SP3 performs twice as fast as Vista SP1 on the same machine -- and slower than the initial release of the Vista OS as well.Businesses having second thoughts about Vista Fewer businesses are now planning to move to Windows Vista than seven months ago, according to a survey by patch management vendor PatchLink.Forrester: Businesses still saying no to Vista An anticipated rush by businesses to adopt Windows Vista hasn't materialized as IT managers stick with familiar systems and wait for the release of Vista Service Pack 1.Microsoft: Vista follow-up likely in 2009 With Vista just out the door, Microsoft is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009.Farewell Vista, hello XP From PCWorld.com: How to make the switch back and deal with the gnarly problem of transferring your Vista e-mail, contacts, and user data back to the old standby operating system.HP CEO: Vista never had its moment in 2007 From CIO.com: Wondering what's happened to momentum for Microsoft's Vista operating system in corporate America? Fact is, enterprise IT has continued to decline the Vista plate like it's an undercooked holiday casserole. Listen to what Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd said: HP never saw a "Vista moment at any time over the past year."UK government report: Don?t upgrade to Vista Report warns British schools not to upgrade to Microsoft's Vista OS and Office 2007 suite, and to avoid Microsoft's OOXML document format because of compatibility concerns.
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Electronic Arts Inc.  has sold the movie rights for  "The Sims," the best-selling computer game, of all time to 20th  Century Fox, Variety said on Friday.
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By Rob Kasper, The Baltimore Sun  Dec. 9--Over the weekend we moved our home computer.   I thought this would be easier than moving furniture, say lugging a sofa bed up a flight of stairs.   Now I am not so sure.
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SANTA CLARA, Calif.--The business of selling software is due for an extreme makeover, industry executives said at the SoftSummit conference .
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The software giant announces several changes and plans for its Virtual PC software, which lets Windows run on Apple machines.
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Thanks to powerful mobile processors and graphics chips, more hard-core gamers are moving away from desktops.
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Getting a life gets a lot more complicated in this sequel to the best-selling computer game in history.
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EA releases a recreation of the cartoon family that spoofs the game industry.
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If kitchen appliances and other household objects are exhibiting strange behavior in your virtual home, you may have unknowingly picked up hacked code from the official Sims 2 website. What's more, you may have spread it.
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Sharp will make its first play for the living room PC space later this year with a machine that looks less like a computer and more like a consumer electronics product.