How to Use Windows

Listening to many gamers and critics prattle on about Mass Effect 2 is kind of like listening to a teenager talk about their first love. The game, they say, can do no wrong. It’s a pure, perhaps even blind sort of love, and at first glance, it’s well-deserved. But no videogame – no matter how much of its dialogue is delivered in Martin Sheen’s seductively raspy warble – is perfect. Problem is, many of Mass Effect 2’s detractors are picking on the wrong “flaw.” For Mass Effect 2, the word of the day that’s got nitpickers screaming like they’re on an episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse is “streamlined.” Or, in many cases, its more derogatory cousin: “dumbed-down.” “Mass Effect 2’s not even an RPG anymore,” many of them hoot and holler.

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Say what you will about Microsoft, but they’ve always made pretty good mice in our book. The Redmond giant’s new BlueTrack technology has made for some fairly lust-worthy pointing devices. Though, the pricing has been high thus far. Their newest offerings though, are priced at a mere $30 or less

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Amazon has begun selling physical books published by Macmillan again, suggesting the beginning of a resolution in the battle over ebook pricing between the publisher and the retailer. It all began a week and a half ago, when Macmillan, whose imprints include Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Henry Holt and Co., demanded that Amazon charged more than the standard $9.99 for its titles that were sold as ebook titles for the Kindle reader. Macmillan wanted more control over the prices charged. Amazon responded by suspending all Macmillan ebook titles from sale, and followed that up a week ago by removing all Macmillan titles from its site – something that was bound to have an impact, since Amazon is the world’s largest book retailer. Physical titles back on sale Now that the dust has settled and tempers have cooled a little, Amazon has begin re-selling Macmillan titles.

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The B&W Zeppelin Mini is a slimmed down version of the frankly enormous original B&W Zeppelin iPod dock . While similar in looks, the Zeppelin Mini is about one third the size of its big brother and it’s similarly lacking in audio power as a result. Its dual 18W speakers pack a small punch compared to the combined 100W in the original. However, the Zeppelin Mini does feature a swivel docking station for flipping your iPod into landscape mode if that’s how you roll. And more excitingly, if you leave the dock plugged into your PC or Mac via USB, you can sync your iPod or iPhone with iTunes simply by placing it in the dock

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Amazon’s Kindle is a neat idea, as are eReaders in general. But they aren’t much good if there’s nothing to ‘eRead’ on them. Book publishers, still stuck in last century’s economic models, are slow to come around to Jeff Bezo’s world of bits-and-bytes, leaving a gap in what is and what might be. Amazon has moved to shore-up that gap, at least for the Kindle and Amazon’s digital bookstore: it’s offering to pay authors and publishers a new royalty of 70 percent of list price –doubling the current 35 percent rate. Well, not quite 70 percent

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For years, the publishing industry has been waiting for its iPod moment, the time when electronic books become mainstream. It looks like that moment will happen in 2010: this year’s CES had more electronic books than a library for Daleks, and some outfit called Apple is apparently getting ready to release a tablet computer-cum-ebook reader that’ll sell a few units . That’s the good news. The bad news is that if ebooks take off, the pirates won’t be far behind. Piracy is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean piracy needs to do to the book industry what it did to music.

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Is it time to burn your books? Hyped by the tech press, the ebook reader is yet to become a ‘must have’ gadget, but dropping prices, web browsing and the genre’s eco-friendly credentials could be about to spark genuine literary interest. Presenting a six to ten-inch screen, the eook reader’s primary skill is capacity. They’re able to hold around 1,000 books, and most are expandable using SD cards, though it’s important to understand how the market is divided. There’s basically two choices.

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Amazon’s Kindle is the hottest selling item across the company’s entire site, and Barnes & Noble can’t make enough Nook readers to satisfy demand. It would appear that e-book readers are poised to become as popular as netbooks, and that’s good news all around, right? You would think so, but there are a handful of publishers playing the part of Scrooge this holiday season. Simon & Schuster, for example, has decided to delay by four months the electronic book editions of some 35 leading titles coming out in 2010. Why

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Is XHTML dead? In July, the XHTML2 working group announced it would be dropping the spec and closing the book on XHTML2. That’s XHTML with a 2. Not XHTML. XHTML is alive and well – it’s just not getting the overhaul that was intended with XHTML2.

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It’s a very exciting time to be a web designer or developer. The reason is simple: with a small amount of money, a lot of heart and a great idea, you can take on the giants of the web. Here we’re going to look at some Davids who are taking on the Goliaths of the online world. bit.ly vs Digg For those of you who haven’t used bit.ly, it’s a simple shortening service that turns horribly long URLs into short little memorable ones. That might not sound that exciting, but what’s bringing it to people’s attention is the way that it’s snapping at the heels of Digg.com in terms of determining which websites and pages are popular.

The full story can be found on Tech Radar