labs

What came first, the chicken or the egg? For PC gamers, the answer is a no brainer...The advanced hardware comes first, and the game titles that can truly take advantage of that hardware come months, if not years, later. It comes as no surprise that Microsoft's own DirectX 10 page talks about the benefits of DX10 in the future tense: "Many of the newest Windows games will take full advantage of the next-generation graphics technology in Windows Vista called DirectX 10." (Italics added.)

Game developers have little incentive right now to produce games for DX10, as … Read more

Digg seems to have outgrown Google as its ad provider, as today marks the start of a new three-year deal with Microsoft to serve up ads on the popular social news service. Microsoft is replacing Google for serving up many of the ads you see on Digg's pages. The rest are provided by Federated Media, which also works with Digg to create special branded pages like the newly-updated Arc visualization in Digg labs.

Digg is claiming the move is about scalability, and positive reviews from Facebook who also uses Microsoft for their contextual advertising. What does this mean for … Read more

Welcome to Inside CNET Labs, an occasional column on the ins and outs of testing tech goods for CNET Reviews. Here, we'll rant and elucidate, giving you a little peek into CNET's most geek-filled department.

I'm starting to question just how much printer vendors value their own products.

One of our prerequisites at CNET Labs is that when we test an inkjet printer for quality, we must use the best available paper provided by the vendor. This allows us to determine the highest quality threshold for the printer, which in turn allows us to fairly compare the … Read more

After two days of timing and comparing the iPhone's download speed between AT&T's EDGE network and Wi-Fi, our CNET Lab has just released its official results.

EDGE averaged a download time of 15.69 minutes for a 9.4MB file, while Wi-Fi required a mere 1.18 minutes. In the end, our test results indicate that the iPhone's Wi-Fi connection is about 13 times faster than using EDGE.

Tests were run at different points throughout the day to account for changes in network bandwidth, and the iPhone was reformatted after each download to ensure that … Read more

A friend and I were discussing the state of software adoption yesterday. Our kids were floating down a river toward us, and we had plenty of time to talk about our respective companies as the kids kept repeating the trip.

It struck both of us that the problem with enterprise software is that it tends to forget how people actually work. Things like CRM, ECM, etc., tend to require users to change their normal behavior to fit the application. As a result, they tend to not get used, or at least not unless someone threatens to withhold compensation.

In the Web 2.0 world, Tim O'Reilly has spent the last few years advocating "architectures of participation" (meaning, as Tim further clarifies, that "users pursuing their own 'selfish' interests build collective value as an automatic byproduct" of their participation). But in most enterprise software, users must spin extra cycles to provide group value, e.g., they spend all day in e-mail or on the phone but then have to go to a Web page to record their sales activities in a CRM system.

Surely we're missing something.… Read more

I'm an advisor to Bungee Labs and am spending the day with the company (along with other advisors from Sun, Amazon, etc.). I'm not a developer myself, and so focus more on the community-building activities of the company, but they mentioned an incident at the eBay Developers Conference that I found fascinating.

eBay developed a new eBay Shopping Web Services WSDL. They stopped by the Bungee Labs booth and asked what the company could do with it.

By dragging and dropping components and objects, [Bungee] had a simple application running in minutes. The application had an input field to specify a search query. When you clicked the search button, the query results (item title, gallery URL, View Item URL, etc.) were displayed on the form.

Start to finish, this all took less than 20 minutes. Not bad for working with a new API. And, as [Bungee] pointed out, we never left the web browser!… Read more

Not to be outdone by its higher-end fashion brethren like Prada, denim mainstay Levi's will be selling a mobile phone and marketing it to young, label-conscious technosexuals, the company announced in Paris this week. The original partnership was announced in October.

The steel-encased phone, manufactured by the French company ModeLabs, comes with a detachable chain that's reminiscent of vintage pocket watches. Buyers will be able to choose between metallic silver, brown copper, and black color schemes; for those with more feminine inclinations, "shiny silver" and "shiny sand" models will also be introduced, featuring "… Read more

As the automated Mpack attack continues to turn thousands of legitimate Web sites into compromised sites offering drive-by downloads of malicious software, security researcher Roger Thompson over at Exploit Prevention Labs reminds us there are other exploits compromising legitimate sites, and some are as easy to find as entering a simple search string on Google. For more than a week (starting before the current Mpack attack), Thompson has been posting a list of dangerous search strings on his blog site. I've collected these and indicated in parentheses some of the known exploits associated.

Cambridge, Mass.--The industry around virtual worlds, also referred to as the 3-D Internet, is chaotic and messy but on the brink of mainstream adoption, said Mitch Kapor, chairman of the Linden Labs and PC industry pioneer.

Kapor spoke here on Friday in an event organized by IBM and the MIT media Lab on virtual worlds. Linden Labs is the maker of Second Life, a popular virtual world environment.

During his talk, Kapor drew many parallels between the early days of the PC and virtual worlds: there are many people who are skeptical of virtual worlds and the product is … Read more