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Enraged by what they call “draconian” copyright protections, thousands of people flooded Amazon.com to give the game a one-star rating. And now there seems to be another movement afoot, one that is far more likely to hit EA where it counts.

After years of anticipation, the coming-out party for Electronic Arts’ new evolution game Spore seems to be getting rained out.

Spore was one of the most highly anticipated games in recent years, in part because it’s the brainchild of Will Wright who, with The Sims, turned simple tasks like taking virtual trips to the bathroom into the best-selling PC game ever. Fans and EA alike had high hopes for Spore, a similarly quirky game that’s based on evolutionary biology and individuals’ own creature creations.

So will EA consider the DRM move a mistake? PR representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but that will likely depend on how well it sells. In its first week, it seemed to do pretty well–at least anecdotally, with stores around the country reporting they’d sold out of their stock.

What’s the fuss about? Electronic Arts imposed copyright protections that limited the number of times a user can install the game to three. EA has likened the system to the limits imposed on songs bought through Apple’s iTunes store (though in the case of iTunes, users can easily manage their libraries by specifying which computers are authorized to play their purchased content).

Though it didn’t appear to have broken any overall download records at the time this story was published, peer-to-peer research company Big Champagne told Forbes on Friday that the rate at which it was being downloaded was “extraordinary.”

Such digital rights management technology is intended to keep piracy to a minimum. But in this case, it seems to have had the opposite effect, angering would-be buyers and DRM opponents to such a degree that they are illegally downloading it en masse, apparently to make a statement as much as to get their hands on the game.

By most accounts, Spore is a great game. But in the first week since its debut, many of the people perhaps most excited for its release have turned against it.

Clarification: Story updated at 6:57 p.m. to clarify the difference between the Spore and iTunes models.

On Saturday, TorrentFreak wrote that the game had already been downloaded more than 500,000 times on BitTorrent sites.

Meanwhile, all that talk of Web OSes or Webtops seems to be coming from Microsoft, the company with presumably the most to lose as computing moves from the PC to the Web.

• Flexible Application Model–developers can choose what application developer model best fits their needs.

“As an RIA fan boy, I’m excited to see what people build on top of Live Mesh because I think it tries to solve the right problem. We should just have access to our data. It shouldn’t matter if we’re in the browser, on the desktop, or on a device. That’s a goal I think both Adobe and Microsoft share and I think the next couple of years are going to be great in unifying the Web and getting rid of ‘Web application’ versus ‘browser applications.’ They’re just going to be applications when all is said and done.”

People have long said Microsoft doesn’t “get” the Web or is too tied to its desktop heritage. Well, part of the PC legacy is the hard drive, as in “your information.”

As with most core strategies at Microsoft, Live Mesh has a strong platform angle.

Ryan Stewart, a rich Internet application (RIA) evangelist at Adobe Systems, pointed out how important Live Mesh is to getting Silverlight, Microsoft’s alternative to Adobe Flash, onto more devices. Live Mesh only works on Windows machines now, but Silverlight runs on the
Mac OS, Linux through Moonlight, and mobile devices. Stewart writes:

With Ray Ozzie as chief software architect, Microsoft is tackling one of the trickiest computing problems of the day: data.

Along with giving people access to a test version, the company offered a tech preview that will allow developers to access the Mesh APIs to write Web applications with the data-syncing features.

• Services Are the Core of the Platform–the Live Mesh platform exposes a number of core services including some Live Services that can all be accessed using the Live Mesh API; these include Storage (online and offline), Membership, Sync, Peer-to-Peer Communication and Newsfeed.

(Credit:
CNET News.com) In the Live Mesh blog, Microsoft general manager Amit Mital laid out the guiding principles for developers:

At the Web 2.0 Expo on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled Live Mesh, a cloud service for synchronizing files, folders, and Web-delivered content, such as news feeds, across multiple devices.

Josh Catone at ReadWrite Web said that Live Mesh brings offline access to Web applications, much like Adobe AIR and Google Gears (which is still in development). Catone writes:

What developers actually do with the Live Mesh platform remains to be seen. But third-party applications are key to delivering on its promise.

Microsoft is taking an offline approach that is more akin to Google Gears or Mozilla Prism than Adobe AIR–the Web-to-desktop functionality of Mesh is essentially a wrapper for the actual Web app.

• Same API on Clients and in the Cloud–the programming model is the same for the cloud and all connected devices, which means a Live Mesh application works exactly the same regardless of whether it’s running in the cloud, in a browser, on a desktop, or on a mobile device.

“Is this like a WebOS (Webdesktop, Webtop?)–yes, although everyone seems to be avoiding the term, this is a lot like all those WebOS apps you’ve seen. You get a virtual desktop with 5GB of storage and you can access it from anywhere. It’s integrated with Windows’ Remote Desktop, so it’s really simple to set up,” writes Stan Schroeder at Mashable.

• Open, Extendable Data Model–a basic data model is provided for the most common tasks needed for a Live Mesh application; developers can also customize and extend the data model in any fashion that is needed for a specific application.

“Web apps using the Mesh platform will be able to lean on the client software to take their Web applications offline, including all user data, and sync it up when the user gets back online at a later time.

Reaction among developers and tech bloggers has been generally positive, likely because Live Mesh seems to serve a real need for people with multiple devices. Developers also shed light on how the platform helps Microsoft competitively.

The short I made consisted of nine scenes and took about a half hour to make, however most of that was me learning how to use the tool. Part of the process is picking out ready made characters and customizing them which is fairly intuitive and similar to working on a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. As the author you can move objects up and down, and program in things like automated object movement and transitions.

The tool also feels a little cramped on larger screens as it doesn’t scale to match the extra width. This, too, is a small quibble, but after having played with Flash game creator PlayCrafter yesterday (story), tools that account for this extra space make it far easier for people who are serious about using them as an alternative to desktop applications.

One cool feature is that you can upload pictures from your hard drive, Facebook, or Flickr and turn them into props, backgrounds, or human heads. These heads can be stuck onto the bodies of pre-made characters, so with just a few head shots you can make your very own animated faces by splicing scenes together.

Like most video editing applications GoAnimate centers around a time line. Everything is drag and drop, so you can pick out characters, props, backgrounds and special effects and simple put them on the canvas where you see fit. Each “scene” can be edited to last as long as you want, and you can drag finished scenes around the time line to re-order them. Basically everything is set up to let you quickly clone and continue your work with minimal effort.

While simple to use, the tool is not without its shortcomings. For instance, you can’t set up several character movements or actions within one scene. This means attaching a speech bubble to a character requires its own scene instead of being able to time out multiple speech bubbles in one scene using delay. I know this seems like a small quibble, but it means adding in more scenes when you could simply mark out the action on a separate time line.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

GoAnimate lets you stick cropped heads onto ready-made animated characters quickly and easily. The results can be rather humorous.

GoAnimate is a browser-based animation studio. It lets you build multi-scene animated creations, complete with support for music, transitions, and user-uploaded page elements. I spent most of this morning playing around with it and the results are about on par with what you’d find on one of those animated greeting cards.

GoAnimate is completely free to use. You can see an example of the test one I made here.

Now that the IT industry has gone ga-ga over green technology, it makes me wonder where the heck Uncle Sam is in this process. Green is good for the environment, but it ain’t free. Lots of large companies want to invest in green IT (and other green initiatives) but altruism alone won’t get the job done. Businesses need good old ROI before parting with their dough.

Given the fact that taxpayers are receiving a rebate this year in order to stimulate the economy, isn’t it time that the federal government steps up with some tax breaks for green initiatives? This could certainly benefit the IT industry, which I admit is a selfish rationale, but I’ll feel a bit better about myself when the air is a bit cleaner and we begin to free ourselves from our $100-a-barrel oil habit.

When I bought my 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid, I realized that I was only going to achieve incrementally improved gas mileage. Nevertheless, I made the plunge because: 1) It felt good to do so, and 2) I knew that I would be getting a fat tax credit from the IRS.

The partnership began in 1996 with a Sony camcorder using a Zeiss lens, then extended to compact cameras. More recently, with Sony’s entry into the SLR market, Zeiss-branded lenses are available on those high-end cameras, too.

Another electronics giant making its way into the camera market, Panasonic, has adopted a similar strategy with another German camera company renowned for its engineering, Leica.

Carl Zeiss’ camera lens division renewed a partnership with Sony for another five years, the companies announced Wednesday.

Mossberg: “If you’ve been waiting to buy an iPhone until it dropped in price, or ran on faster cell networks, you might want to take the plunge, if you can live with the higher service costs and the weaker battery life. The same goes for those with existing iPhones who love the device but crave faster cellular data speeds. But if you already own an iPhone, and can usually use Wi-Fi for data, you probably should hold off and get the free software upgrade before deciding whether it’s worth getting the new hardware.”

On the plus side, all three reviewers thought Apple dramatically improved the audio quality of the iPhone 3G, both in terms of the built-in
iPod and the phone. All were enthused about the new applications that would be coming to the phone; Pogue wrote, “Above all, the iPhone is about to become a dazzling hand-held game machine.” And, of course, downloading Web pages over a 3G network is much faster than over an EDGE network, which you probably already knew.

Still, some interesting details were revealed. Mossberg didn’t seem very happy about the battery life. “In my tests, the iPhone 3G’s battery was drained much more quickly in a typical day of use than the battery on the original iPhone, due to the higher power demands of 3G networks,” he wrote. “In daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20% by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day.”

The iPhone 3G, which goes on sale to the public Friday, gets generally positive marks from three prominent gadget reviewers.

CNET’s Kent German will have his own review up this Friday, when the iPhone 3G is formally released.

Baig: “While not everything on my wish list made it onto the new device, Apple has raised the bar with iPhone 3G. To which I offer an enthusiastic thumbs up.”

(Credit:
Apple)

The first iPhone 3G reviews have been released, and if you’ve been paying attention to the news for the past month, you won’t be surprised.

As far as nits go, that was about it. The outstanding issues remain: the touchscreen keyboard doesn’t work for everybody, the cost of operating an iPhone has risen despite the drop in the starting price, and it doesn’t have things like voice-dialing or MMS.

Pogue didn’t address battery life, but Baig thought the iPhone 3G consumed roughly the same amount of juice as its predecessor. “I started receiving low battery warnings toward the end of a busy work day; I found myself charging the device overnight, the same as with the older iPhone.”

So, what was the final verdict?

One big addition to the iPhone 3G was GPS, but according to Pogue, Apple has said the antenna is too small to permit useful things like turn-by-turn navigation. Baig, however, didn’t think it was that bad: “I was pretty impressed by the accuracy on the new device as I drove along in my
car, searched for nearby pizza places, and requested directions,” he wrote.

Pogue: “So the iPhone 3G is a nice upgrade. It more than keeps pace with advancing technology, and new buyers will generally be delighted. But it’s not so much better that it turns all those original iPhones into has-beens. Indeed, the really big deal is the iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store, neither of which requires buying a new iPhone. That twist may come as a refreshing surprise to planned-obsolescence conspiracy theorists — and everyone who stood in line last year.”

Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital, David Pogue of The New York Times, and Edward Baig of USA Today were the chosen few selected to review the
iPhone 3G ahead of its launch on Friday. There wasn’t nearly as much suspense about the reviews this year, since we already knew the iPhone 3G was–with the exception of the faster networks, GPS, and third-party applications–essentially the same phone.

Acoustic Research announced two new specialty headphones models on Friday: a 5.1 USB solution and wireless headphones that offer uncompressed sound quality up to 100 feet.

Look for reviews of both these headphones in coming weeks.

The AWD209 Wireless Headphone System complements the AWD510 that we recently reviewed, except the 209s do not offer true 5.1 surround. Instead, these headphones have two speakers in each ear cup, one of which is completely dedicated to bass output. Acoustic Research claims the phones will work up to 100 feet via the 2.4GHz transmitter and will provide uncompressed sound for up to eight hours. The AWD209 will be available in October for $150.

(Credit:
Acoustic Research)

The ARW200 5.1 Dolby Digital headphones connect to any PC or
Mac via an open USB port and provide you with three separate speakers in each ear. The headphones also fold up in an included travel bag for 5.1 on the go. Also included is optional software should you want to save your personal treble and bass settings. Retailing for $100, the ARW200 are available now. We recently took a look at the Turtle Beach Ear Force AK-R8 and will put these two head-to-head for our review.

Hydra allows you to harness the power of multiple graphic cards.

The key things that stand out to me are the “above-linear performance” claim and the “all GPUs and chipsets” detail. The current video card in my PC is the ATI Radeon X1950. So, supposedly with Hydra I’ll be able to add a Nvidia GeForce 8800 card to get better performance than the two cards are normally capable of. Whether or not the technology will actually work remains to be seen. LucidLogix claims this will improve the performance of any 3D application dynamically without developers having to write specific code. The trick here will be getting all of this to work seamlessly. I hope they can pull it off, as I’m in need of a “cheap” upgrade and I don’t want to deal with any headaches. Hydra is set to be available starting in the first half of 2009.

The following product is available:

On Sale Now: $109.89
View the latest prices for ATI Radeon X1950 Pro

1. “Cost-effective graphic performance with a near-linear to above-linear performance.”
2. “Eliminate bottlenecks that exist in typical 3D graphic applications.”
3. “Provide interoperability with all GPUs and chipsets.”
4. “Work with the latest versions of DirectX and OpenGL.”

LucidLogix Technologies seeks to make your video card’s processing more efficient. The Israel-based company claims that its new Hydra technology will direct graphic processing traffic between multiple GPUs, using several “intelligent parallelization algorithms.” This is a system-on-a-chip solution that will be embedded into video cards and motherboards. LucidLogix claims this will result in the following:

(Credit: LucidLogix Technologies)

The military escort was not just a sign of the esteem that Ayala is held in–though the Colombian native is something of a favorite son here–but rather an indicator of the danger that remains in the area in an around Corinto. Though its just 30-some miles from Cali, the area is not far from rebel strongholds.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

A herd of cattle blocks the road toward the rural village of Corinto.

A Colombian boy plays in a heavy rain at Juanes de la Paz park in Medellin. The downpour lasted just five minutes.

I also had a chance to tour the factory where workers painstakingly refurbish the computers that end up in places like Corinto. The program, Computadores para Educar (Computers for Education) refurbishes more than 20,000 computers a year. Although the machines are typically a few years old (the minimum specs are machines with Pentium II processors and 128MB of memory), a government study found that the computers the program refurbishes have roughly the same time before failing as new PCs, in part because of its rigorous process of cleaning and testing.

Click here to read all of the stories in The Borders of Computing series.

In Corinto, I saw students thrilled by the opportunity to use decade-old technology and a mayor and principal pleading for the more modern computers that could make an even greater impact. I was also struck by the teacher who helped the students with the computers–a zoologist who moved back to Corinto to help improve the education in the town where she grew up.

Though the trip into the countryside had some risk, it feels important to write about people that are trying to move forward, even as the conflict remains close to their homes. The visit was particularly powerful for me, having known someone in high school, Terry Freitas, who was later kidnapped and killed near the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

Even if they didn’t see the van carrying myself and Microsoft executive Orlando Ayala, it was hard to miss the 20 or so soldiers that accompanied us in a convoy.

At one point on our way there, the road was blocked by a herd of rather skinny cattle. Though on its face amusing (and definitely a Kodak moment), their presence was unsettling to even some of the Colombians in the van. Such incidents can be a diversion to initiate a kidnapping. Thankfully the cows were just cows.

I also doubt I will forget the torrential rain that came out of nowhere as we visited the peace park in Medellin, started by well-known Latin singer Juanes, who is also from Colombia. The rain was probably the hardest I have seen in my life, but lasted just five minutes or so. A few minutes later, the kids taking tennis lessons at the park were back outside playing around.

CORINTO, Colombia–It was easy for the kids at the rural school to see I had arrived.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

However, that painstaking process is costly, and the program often has to supplement donated computers with new parts. As a result, some say the $160 it costs to refurbish a computer may not be the best use of funds, when new machines, capable of running the latest software, can be had for around $280. It’s a fascinating debate, and I plan to describe the program and its challenges more in a post that will go up in the next day or so.

Anger-passion, combined with energy, innovation, imagination, and bold steps, is the ticket to get Sony back on track as it sets out its next three-year growth plan, Stringer is cited as having told the company’s staff of more than 1,000 managers during a closed-door annual management meeting in Japan.

Sony’s CEO Howard Stringer is bringing new meaning to the term “anger management.”

The electronics giant is facing greater pricing competition on the TV front, while Apple is giving it a run for its money on the innovation front.

He wants Sony managers to get mad, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

“I’m asking you to get mad,” Stringer said, according to the Journal report.

To fight back, Sony has unveiled such products as an ultrathin TV screen that resembles a flat-screen computer monitor and a plethora of devices in February at its electronics open house in Las Vegas.

Howard Stringer