The UpStream (Page 469)

While we may have spoken of FarmVille in the past, it isn't really popular among the PLuGHiTz Live! staff. It is, however, very popular among Facebook users. While it doesn't cost any money to play, you do have the ability to purchase in-game items with real world money, in the form of Facebook Credits - the only currency that Facebook allows on its network.

Facebook Credits are 30% profit for Facebook and 70% for the vendor who accepts them. While a very lucrative deal for Facebook, Zynga, the creator of FarmVille, wants more of the money. Facebook, on the other hand, has no interest in negotiating.

I bet most of you forgot about Google Docs but the good news is that Google didn't, or did they? Google acquired the company DocVerse in an effort to create a more Microsoft Office like software suite based on cloud computing. Recently, the director of Microsoft's online product management team, Alex Payne made the argument that Google Docs isn't something that should be used to replace or augment Microsoft Office. When you use Google Docs to convert Office files you lose data consistency such as page breaks, charts, SuperArt and more. To prove his point he gave a demonstration that can be watched below. To explain why consistency issues do not arise when copying Office files to Office Web Apps Payne stated,

If you have a document that was created in Office and you upload it to our Office web apps (Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote) the document will look almost identical when you view it in the browser (IE, Firefox and Safari) *and* we maintain the components in the doc even if you don't see them in the Web.

Hit the break for a quote from Google and a video about the service.

A few weeks ago we talked about Apple being hardcore anti-Flash and the unusual relationship forming with Microsoft Silverlight but Adobe isn't going to take it sitting down after Apple stated last month that developers have to use programming tools based on open standards and not proprietary technology such as Flash. Just two weeks prior to this Steve Jobs released a public letter with 6 reasons why Apple chose not to use flash. The main points focus on supposed technical drawbacks and lack of common interests between the 2 companies. Adobe has responded by taking out advertisements in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, among other newspapers and websites. The "Adobe Loves Apple" campaign can be summed up in a single quote by Adobe founders,

In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web? "And we believe the answer is: nobody -- and everybody, but certainly not a single company.

Guys aren't the only people that can be classified as techies anymore. It looks like technology makes the women happy, too!

Got to love the folks from the UK. One of their research groups, The Chartered Institute for IT, analyzed 35,000 responses from the World Values Survey to make the point that IT, in general, actually makes people happier across the entire globe.

The authors indicated that things like cell phones, computers and broadband open one's "sense of freedom" and allow people to feel more in control of their life, which then promotes the feeling satisfaction in life. They went on to say that it even helps during times of financial turmoil and challenge.

This goes along with the studies that have showed that IT helps the most with people who have it the least.

Those on lower incomes or with fewer educational qualifications appear to benefit more from access to IT than those on higher incomes or with higher educational backgrounds.

Last year I talked about how the PlayStation 3 could be receiving some high marks after the Air Force purchased 2,200 of the consoles for their Research Laboratories. Well, it looks like just the opposite may happen.

As we know, the recent PlayStation 3 update removed the ability to install a secondary operating system like Linux, which Sony claims is to protect copyrighted content. That's fine and all, but using that feature is the exact reason the Air Force purchased all those Cell processors!

Why did the Air Force purchase them and why this many? We have learned that this was the most cost-effective hardware option for them to move forward with several projects using a 500 TeraFLOPS cluster built entirely out of PS3s.

So, they have all the hardware and now it appears they won't be able to use it, right? Not so fast. The update is only downloaded when the console is connected to the PlayStation Network. Because of this, there is no direct, immediate impact on the cluster of consoles that the Air Force has concocted. But what happens when one of the PS3s dies or needs repair? Sad story.

Sony reported its yearly results this week and it's another year in the red for them. Two years ago they saw a $1 billion drop, which was their first loss in fourteen years, so I guess that a $439 million loss this year isn't so bad!

Sony stated that LCD TVs and cameras were the big selling items on their list and that PlayStation 3 sales were up from 10.1 million last year to 13 million this year. To make things even brighter, this year was the first year that the console actually was profitable, mainly due to production costs going down.

Time for the bad news. PSP sales were down this year from 14.4 million to 9.9 million, with game sales falling to 44.4 million from 50.3 million. For the PlayStation 2, Sony saw a decrease of half a million, to 7.2 million and their gaming sales saw a significant fall off the shelf from 83.5 million to 35.7 million. This isn't surprising, as we know the PS2 is quickly fading out as other consoles are seeing stiff price breaks.