Gaming 25 - Hegway Seaven

Gaming 25 - Hegway Seaven

Posted on 1st May 2011 at 10:28 by Podcast with 13 comments

It's only a short week this week what with all the bank holidays and such like but Paul, Joe and Clive still managed to find time to sit down and mull over some of the goings on in the gaming world.

First up, predictably, is the current situation with Sony's PlayStation Network. The service is currently down due to a hacking attack and Sony are currently rushing to rebuild the network from the ground up. This is little comfort to the 75 million PSN users though who have been told that the hackers made off with their personal details and possibly their credit card details too.

We then move on to discuss Portal 2 and what we thought of one of the most eagerly anticipated games of the last 12 months. There is no doubt that the game is great fun, but there are a few niggles in there too.

Finally up for debate is Nintendo's announcement that it's working on the successor to it's immensely popular Wii console. The console is currently titled Project Cafe and there are only a few shaky details about the specifications of it but it's interesting to see Nintendo setting out its stall relatively early on in the next-gen console wars.


As always, we've also set up our weekly competition too, the lucky winner of which will walk away with a Speedlink Strike FX wireless gamepad. This game pad is compatible with both the PC and PlayStation 3, and functions at distances of up to 10m.

As ever, the bit-tech hardware podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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Blog - Some Black Holes May Pre-Date The Big Bang, Say Cosmologists

Black holes are regions of space in which gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. Conventionally, black holes form during a gravitational collapse, after a large supernova for example.

But there is another class of objects called primordial black holes that cosmologists think must have formed in a different way. These are essentially leftovers from the hugely dense ball of stuff from which the universe expanded, some parts of which must have been dense enough to form black holes.

These primordial black holes would then have been widely dispersed as the universe expanded.

Primordial black holes are very different beasts to the ones that form when stars die, in particular because they ought to be much smaller.

Although nobody has yet seen a primordial black hole, our knowledge of them comes from thinking about the processes that must have occurred shortly after the Big Bang.

In recent years, however, cosmologists have begun to think seriously about processes that occurred before the Big Bang. One idea, is that the Universe may eventually collapse leading to an endless cycle of Big Bangs and Crunches.

Today, Bernard Carr at Queen Mary University of London, UK, and Alan Coley at Dalhousie University in Canada, ask what might happen in such a universe in the moments before a crunch.

By some accounts, a Big Crunch generates a singularity that ought to cause everything in the Universe to merge. But Carr and Coley say that in some circumstances, black holes of a certain mass could avoid this fate and survive the crunch as separate entities. The masses for which this is possible range from a few hundred million kilograms to about the mass of our Sun.

That leads to a problem, however. Coley and Carr say that since the mass of primordial and pre-crunch black holes is similar, they will be very difficult to tell apart.

Nobody has yet seen a primordial black hole, although efforts are underway to search for the telltale signatures they ought to produce.

Small black holes ought to evaporate away in relatively short period of time, finally disappearing in a violent explosion of gamma rays. The hope is that observatories such as the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope will see such events. Indeed, some cosmologists say this thinking might explain the gamma ray bursts that we already see from time to time.

What all this means, of course, is that there may be objects in our Universe that predate the Big Bang. And if we can somehow find a way to distinguish them from primordial black holes, we may yet be able to observe these most ancient of objects.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1104.3796 : Persistence Of Black Holes Through A Cosmological Bounce

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Talking to the Wall

Our lives are awash with ambient electromagnetic radiation, from the fields generated by power lines to the signals used to send data between Wi-Fi transmitters. Researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington have found a way to harness this radiation for a computer interface that turns any wall in a building into a touch-sensitive surface.

The technology could allow light switches, thermostats, stereos, televisions, and security systems to be controlled from anywhere in the house, and could lead to new interfaces for games.

"There's all this electromagnetic radiation in the air," says Desney Tan, senior researcher at Microsoft (and a TR35 honoree in 2007). Radio antennas pick up some of the signals, Tan explains, but people can do this too. "It turns out that the body is a relatively good antenna," he says.

The ambient electromagnetic radiation emitted by home appliances, mobile phones, computers, and the electrical wiring within walls is usually considered noise. But the researchers chose to put it at the core of their new interface.

When a person touches a wall with electrical wiring behind it, she becomes an antenna that tunes the background radiation, producing a distinct electrical signal, depending on her body position and proximity to and location on the wall. This unique electrical signal can be collected and interpreted by a device in contact with or close to her body. When a person touches a spot on the wall behind her couch, the gesture can be recognized, and it could be used, for example, to turn down the volume on the stereo.

So far, the researchers have demonstrated only that a body can turn electromagnetic noise into a usable signal for a gesture-based interface. A paper outlining this will be presented next week at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver, BC.

In an experiment, test subjects wore a grounding strap on their wrist?a bracelet that is normally used to prevent the buildup of static electricity in the body. A wire from the strap was connected to an analog-to-digital converter, which fed data from the strap to a laptop worn in a backpack. Machine-learning algorithms then processed the data to identify characteristic changes in the electrical signals corresponding to a person's proximity to a wall, the position of her hand on the wall, and her location within the house.

"Now we can turn any arbitrary wall surface into a touch-input surface," says Shwetak Patel, professor of computer science and engineering and electrical engineering at the University of Washington (and a TR35 honoree in 2009), who was involved with the work. The next step, he says, is to make the data analysis real-time and to make the system even smaller?with a phone or a watch instead of a laptop collecting and analyzing data.

"With Nintendo Wii and Microsoft's Kinect, people are starting to realize that these gesture interfaces can be quite compelling and useful," says Thad Starner, professor in Georgia Tech's College of Computing. "This is the sort of paper that says here is a new direction, an interesting idea; now can we refine it and make it better over time."

Refining the system to make it more user-friendly will be important, says Pattie Maes, a professor in MIT's Media Lab who specializes in computer interfaces. "Many interfaces require some visual, tangible, or auditory feedback so the user knows where to touch." While the researchers suggest using stickers or other marks to denote wall-based controls, this approach might not appeal to everyone. "I think it is intriguing," says Maes, "but may only have limited-use cases."

Joe Paradiso, another professor in MIT's Media Lab, says, "The idea is wild and different enough to attract attention," but he notes that the signal produced could vary depending on the way a person wears the device that collects the signal.

Patel has previously used a building's electrical, water, and ventilation systems to locate people indoors. Tan has worked with sensors that use human brain power for computing and muscle activity to control electronics wirelessly. The two researchers share an interest in pulling useful information out of noisy signals.  With the recent joint project, Tan says, the researchers are "taking junk and making sense of it."

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Microsoft dominated in OS revenue last year

We know that operating systems bring in quite a bit of money, and that Windows is a cash cow for Microsoft, but what are the numbers anyway? Well, it turns out that worldwide operating system revenue totaled $30.4 billion in 2010, a 7.8 percent increase from 2009, according to Gartner.

Linux server and Mac OS were the fastest-growing segments in the server and client categories, respectively, while Microsoft maintained its leading position in the overall OS pie, with 78.6 percent market share in terms of revenue. IBM took second place with 7.5 percent revenue share and HP took third with 3.7 percent revenue share. Oracle was fourth (2.6 percent), Red Hat was fifth (2.0 percent), and Apple was sixth (1.7 percent).

 

 

Oracle entered the market by acquiring Sun Microsystems (and its Solaris business) for $7.4 billion in April 2009. Disregarding Oracle, which Gartner awarded 0.00 percent of the market in 2009, Microsoft gained the most from 2009 to 2010, moving up an additional 0.7 percentage points. Everyone else increased or decreased by either 0.1 percentage points or 0.2 percentage points.

Microsoft's Windows client business had higher growth at 9.2 percent, compared with its Windows server business at 7.5 percent growth. A new wave of PC refreshment after the economic recession was the major reason for the better-performing Windows client business (if you haven't yet heard, Windows 7 is on a roll). The software giant is going to try to pull the same thing off with Windows 8, but something tells us it won't be so easy.

"Generally, client OSs outperformed server OSs and grew 9.3 percent in 2010, while the server OS segment grew 5.7 percent," Matthew Cheung, principal research analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. "The long-pending demand for PC refreshment was unleashed as the economy stepped out from the economic turndown, which drove growth of client OSs."

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Talking to the Wall

Our lives are awash with ambient electromagnetic radiation, from the fields generated by power lines to the signals used to send data between Wi-Fi transmitters. Researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington have found a way to harness this radiation for a computer interface that turns any wall in a building into a touch-sensitive surface.

The technology could allow light switches, thermostats, stereos, televisions, and security systems to be controlled from anywhere in the house, and could lead to new interfaces for games.

"There's all this electromagnetic radiation in the air," says Desney Tan, senior researcher at Microsoft (and a TR35 honoree in 2007). Radio antennas pick up some of the signals, Tan explains, but people can do this too. "It turns out that the body is a relatively good antenna," he says.

The ambient electromagnetic radiation emitted by home appliances, mobile phones, computers, and the electrical wiring within walls is usually considered noise. But the researchers chose to put it at the core of their new interface.

When a person touches a wall with electrical wiring behind it, she becomes an antenna that tunes the background radiation, producing a distinct electrical signal, depending on her body position and proximity to and location on the wall. This unique electrical signal can be collected and interpreted by a device in contact with or close to her body. When a person touches a spot on the wall behind her couch, the gesture can be recognized, and it could be used, for example, to turn down the volume on the stereo.

So far, the researchers have demonstrated only that a body can turn electromagnetic noise into a usable signal for a gesture-based interface. A paper outlining this will be presented next week at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver, BC.

In an experiment, test subjects wore a grounding strap on their wrist?a bracelet that is normally used to prevent the buildup of static electricity in the body. A wire from the strap was connected to an analog-to-digital converter, which fed data from the strap to a laptop worn in a backpack. Machine-learning algorithms then processed the data to identify characteristic changes in the electrical signals corresponding to a person's proximity to a wall, the position of her hand on the wall, and her location within the house.

"Now we can turn any arbitrary wall surface into a touch-input surface," says Shwetak Patel, professor of computer science and engineering and electrical engineering at the University of Washington (and a TR35 honoree in 2009), who was involved with the work. The next step, he says, is to make the data analysis real-time and to make the system even smaller?with a phone or a watch instead of a laptop collecting and analyzing data.

"With Nintendo Wii and Microsoft's Kinect, people are starting to realize that these gesture interfaces can be quite compelling and useful," says Thad Starner, professor in Georgia Tech's College of Computing. "This is the sort of paper that says here is a new direction, an interesting idea; now can we refine it and make it better over time."

Refining the system to make it more user-friendly will be important, says Pattie Maes, a professor in MIT's Media Lab who specializes in computer interfaces. "Many interfaces require some visual, tangible, or auditory feedback so the user knows where to touch." While the researchers suggest using stickers or other marks to denote wall-based controls, this approach might not appeal to everyone. "I think it is intriguing," says Maes, "but may only have limited-use cases."

Joe Paradiso, another professor in MIT's Media Lab, says, "The idea is wild and different enough to attract attention," but he notes that the signal produced could vary depending on the way a person wears the device that collects the signal.

Patel has previously used a building's electrical, water, and ventilation systems to locate people indoors. Tan has worked with sensors that use human brain power for computing and muscle activity to control electronics wirelessly. The two researchers share an interest in pulling useful information out of noisy signals.  With the recent joint project, Tan says, the researchers are "taking junk and making sense of it."

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News Analysis: Amid Skepticism, Pakistan Calculates Its Response

It was amply clear on Monday that the Pakistani military was experiencing a gamut of shock and embarrassment. Pakistan?s official statement, slow in coming, was clearly calculated to put the best face on a moment that threatens to reset relations with the United States.

But the United States? preoccupation with Pakistan ? a nuclear-armed state with rising levels of militancy ? revolves around more than Bin Laden, important as he was, and officials on both sides may seek to avoid a sharp turn toward hostility.

Not least, the United States would like Pakistani cooperation in the continuing fight against terrorism and in ending the war in Afghanistan at a moment when Bin Laden?s capture was bound to alter the debate about whether the United States should withdraw from a costly nine-year war.

American officials stopped well short of accusing Pakistan of sheltering Bin Laden, but they strongly indicated that they would want answers about the extent of the network in Pakistan that allowed Bin Laden to live and hide in apparent comfort for so long.

?It?s inconceivable that Bin Laden did not have a support system in the country that allowed him to remain there for an extended period of time,? John O. Brennan, the president?s top counterterrorism official, said at a White House briefing on Monday.

?I am not going to speculate about what type of support he might have had on an official basis inside of Pakistan,? he added. ?We are closely talking to the Pakistanis right now, and again, we are leaving open opportunities to continue to pursue whatever leads might be out there.?

At a Pentagon briefing in Washington on Monday, a senior Defense Department official said, ?We have no indications that the Pakistanis were aware that Osama Bin Laden was at the compound in Abbottabad,? the city where he was killed, about an hour?s drive from the capital.

Similarly, a former senior C.I.A. official who closely followed the hunt for Bin Laden said he had heard of no evidence that Bin Laden was being protected by the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan?s spy agency. He called speculation on the subject premature.

?I would be very surprised if he was under ISI protection,? said the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said that the ISI probably knew the identity of the owner of the large compound where Bin Laden was discovered, but not that Bin Laden was hiding there. He said many religiously conservative Pakistanis had a favorable view of Bin Laden.

But others were deeply skeptical, noting that Bin Laden was hiding virtually next door to a military academy.

Some said that at worst, rogue ISI officers or former officers might be involved. But others saw a darker conspiracy.

?Someone knew,? Maj. Gen. James R. Helmly, who was the top American officer in Pakistan from mid-2006 to mid-2008, said in a telephone interview from Georgia, where he is now retired.

?Whether it?s in the top echelons of the ISI is anyone?s guess,? he said. ?But if someone is building a big ostentatious project like that, and if it?s like where I live, people are going to say, ?I wonder who?s living there?? ?

Some American counterterrorism officials said it was almost inconceivable that Pakistan?s security services would be in the dark about the residents of such a compound. ?It would be a major intelligence lapse by Pakistani military and police not to know what was going on there,? said Seth G. Jones, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation who until February worked on Afghanistan and Pakistan issues for United States Special Operations Command.

Pakistani analysts expressed puzzlement that while the Pakistani government had issued a statement acknowledging Bin Laden?s capture, the military and intelligence service were strangely silent.

?If Bin Laden?s presence was not known to Pakistan?s security agencies when he was located close to important military installation, it will be viewed as their incompetence or overconfidence,? Hasan Askari Rizvi, a military analyst in Lahore, said in an e-mail message. ?If they knew about his presence but did not take action, this will raise questions about the agenda of Pakistan?s security agencies for fighting terrorism. ?

Some senior American military and counterterrorism officials said that the Obama administration could use the moment to prod Pakistan to take more aggressive actions against militant groups within its borders.

?It has the potential to further sour relations or, for the United States, it could be an opportunity to leverage this for more cooperation,? said Juan Zarate, a top counterterrorism official under President George W. Bush. ?The Pakistanis are cowed and chagrined.?

Carlotta Gall reported from Islamabad, and Eric Schmitt from Brussels. Reporting was contributed by Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan; Waqar Gillani from Islamabad; Salman Masood from Abbottabad, Pakistan; and David Rohde and Pir Zubair Shah from New York.

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Obama Finds Praise, Even From Republicans

Former Vice President Dick Cheney declared, ?The administration clearly deserves credit for the success of the operation.? New York?s former mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said, ?I admire the courage of the president.? And Donald J. Trump declared, ?I want to personally congratulate President Obama.?

As fleeting as it might prove to be, the positive tone stood in blunt contrast to the narrative Republicans have been working to build in the opening stages of the 2012 presidential campaign.

The argument that most potential Republican candidates have been making ? that Mr. Obama is an indecisive leader, incapable of handling rapidly evolving events around the world ? suddenly became more complicated. And the boost in stature for Mr. Obama, even if temporary, comes when a number of Republicans are deciding whether to commit themselves to the presidential race, and offered fresh evidence that he might be less vulnerable than his opponents thought.

The development came at a good time for Mr. Obama, who received the worst foreign policy rating of his presidency in a New York Times/CBS News poll last month, with 46 percent of respondents saying they disapproved of his handling of international affairs. But the implications for the president, who will visit the World Trade Center on Thursday, were impossible to predict.

The nation?s unemployment rate remains relatively high, and the economic recovery has yet to gain traction. High gasoline prices are pinching consumer budgets and eroding confidence. Seventy percent of Americans in the Times/CBS poll last month said the country was on the wrong track, and the White House is heading into what could be a bitter fight with Republicans about spending and raising the debt limit.

But at a minimum, Mr. Obama has been dealt another high-profile opportunity to try to position himself above the bitter partisan fray and offer a voice of reasoned compromise ? a theme consistent with his strategy over the past six months of shedding Republican efforts to cast him as a partisan liberal out of touch with the country?s values.

?The world is safer; it is a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden,? Mr. Obama said Monday. ?Today, we are reminded that, as a nation, there?s nothing we can?t do when we put our shoulders to the wheel, when we work together, when we remember the sense of unity that defines us as Americans.?

The terrorist attacks that Bin Laden masterminded in New York and Washington a decade ago caused a significant shift in the nation?s politics. It remained to be seen to what extent his killing ? dramatic as it was ? would reorder the political landscape.

The developments came at a big moment in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, with new prospective candidates like Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana facing pressure to jump in. Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor who just returned from two years as ambassador to China to open a presidential run, found his efforts to trumpet his foreign policy experience immediately overshadowed.

?The president deserves and will receive credit for Bin Laden being killed on his watch,? said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who advised Mr. Giuliani?s 2008 presidential bid. ?Like Sept. 11 and its aftermath, this is a moment that transcends politics.?

Karl Rove, the Republican strategist for President George W. Bush, said that party?s crop of presidential aspirants would be wise to not be ?churlish.? But he said he did not believe Bin Laden?s death would be a deciding issue in the 2012 campaign.

?This will tend to cause a lot of people to say we got our job done,? Mr. Rove said, noting a similar reaction when Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003. ?This is a moment that will require him to say, ?Here?s what needs to be done to prevail in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Yemen, in the broader war on terror.? ?

For Mr. Obama, the killing of Bin Laden represented a significant mark in his evolution as a national political leader, a career that has developed entirely in the decade since 9/11.

He was initially warned against seeking higher office because his name looked and sounded like Bin Laden?s. His campaign assertions that he would unilaterally act against ?high-value terrorist targets? in Pakistan were met with charges of naďveté from rivals ? including Hillary Rodham Clinton ? for telegraphing such a move. The president?s advisers declined to discuss the political ramifications of the Bin Laden killing. But they said that they were mindful of the lessons of 1992, when the approval ratings of President George Bush rocketed after the Gulf War.

Samuel K. Skinner, the White House chief of staff at the time, remembered how Mr. Bush emerged with approval ratings of around 90 percent only to lose to Bill Clinton the following year.

?Everybody was shocked at how quickly things had dropped, precipitously,? Mr. Skinner said in an interview Monday. ?Because of economic issues ? and people?s perspectives of where the economy was ? we were basically down south of 50 percent by October and November, and we were never able to recover.?

More recently, the bump in the polls that George W. Bush received after the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003 evaporated within months.

In his first presidential campaign, Mr. Obama reaped considerable political benefit from his anti-Iraq war candidacy. In his second, he is hoping that he reaps the same level of benefit from his established role as a commander in chief who sent more troops to Afghanistan, authorized military strikes on Libya and signed off on the mission to kill Bin Laden.

John Ullyot, a former Marine intelligence officer who served as a Republican spokesman on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the operation was ?a gutsy call because so much could have gone wrong.?

?The fact that Obama approved this mission instead of the safer option of bombing the compound was the right call militarily,? Mr. Ullyot said, ?but also a real roll of the dice politically because of how quickly it could have unraveled.?

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5 ways Facebook could help you avoid embarrassing situations

So if your main concern with Facebook is that you may post things you later regret, then maybe Facebook should help by enabling features that could prevent the drunk-posting of pics and status updates. Here are five fun ways Facebook could help us avoid embarassing situations. And avoid your worst fear of ending up Failbook.

1. What?s that you?re drinking?

Facebook has facial recognition, why not have liquid recognition? If a photo contains beers or fancy cocktails, Facebook could alert us of the potential dangers of posting party pics. In fact, why stop at photos when you could scan for weird facial expressions, exposed body parts or forced laughter?

2. Steal Gmail?s Mail Goggles

Mail Goggles require you to solve simple math questions before you can send that late night love declaration. Facebook could do the same for late night status updates or rants on other people?s walls.

3. Relationship reminders

When you?re posting something, be it late at night or in the middle of the day, Facebook could show a little reminder at the bottom of your screen reminding you who can see this. While it may seem obvious to you that all your friends can see your updates, that doesn?t mean you always immediately realise that your parents, boss and colleagues may be amongst those friends.

If you have identified important relationships like family members, a simple message ?Your mother, boss, parents, sister, wife, boyfriend can see this!? should suffice in stopping you from posting things you shouldn?t post. Unless you don?t care about that ? but then why you?re still reading this?

4. So you?re chilling at the Upstairs?
It?s more spontaneous to share things as they happen. That?s why Facebook Places was launched in the first place: so you can check yourself and your friends in. The tag opens up a whole new possibilities for drunk-posting-prevention as Facebook can determine where you are. If that?s the Upstairs Dance Bar or the Hard Rock Café, then perhaps Facebook could ask you whether you?re really sure that you won?t regret that hilarious topless pic in the morning.

5. Morning After Button

Say you?ve posted some crazy things late night. The next morning you check Facebook, not sure anymore what you?ve posted and where. Wouldn?t it be nice if Facebook greeted you with a message saying ?Good morning, hope you?re feeling as good as you did last night when you posted these status updates?? ? followed by a list of your late night postings and a delete and edit button. If you sent some private messages, then at least you know who to apologize to for the drunken love confessions or incomprehensible rants.

What fun, innovative features can you come up? How can Facebook help us stop posting embarassing photos and videos? Let me know in the comments!

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Microsoft dominated in OS revenue last year

We know that operating systems bring in quite a bit of money, and that Windows is a cash cow for Microsoft, but what are the numbers anyway? Well, it turns out that worldwide operating system revenue totaled $30.4 billion in 2010, a 7.8 percent increase from 2009, according to Gartner.

Linux server and Mac OS were the fastest-growing segments in the server and client categories, respectively, while Microsoft maintained its leading position in the overall OS pie, with 78.6 percent market share in terms of revenue. IBM took second place with 7.5 percent revenue share and HP took third with 3.7 percent revenue share. Oracle was fourth (2.6 percent), Red Hat was fifth (2.0 percent), and Apple was sixth (1.7 percent).

 

 

Oracle entered the market by acquiring Sun Microsystems (and its Solaris business) for $7.4 billion in April 2009. Disregarding Oracle, which Gartner awarded 0.00 percent of the market in 2009, Microsoft gained the most from 2009 to 2010, moving up an additional 0.7 percentage points. Everyone else increased or decreased by either 0.1 percentage points or 0.2 percentage points.

Microsoft's Windows client business had higher growth at 9.2 percent, compared with its Windows server business at 7.5 percent growth. A new wave of PC refreshment after the economic recession was the major reason for the better-performing Windows client business (if you haven't yet heard, Windows 7 is on a roll). The software giant is going to try to pull the same thing off with Windows 8, but something tells us it won't be so easy.

"Generally, client OSs outperformed server OSs and grew 9.3 percent in 2010, while the server OS segment grew 5.7 percent," Matthew Cheung, principal research analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. "The long-pending demand for PC refreshment was unleashed as the economy stepped out from the economic turndown, which drove growth of client OSs."

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Detective Work on Courier Led to Breakthrough on Bin Laden

A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden?s whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a compound 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American counterterrorism operations. The property was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier.

What followed was eight months of painstaking intelligence work, culminating in a helicopter assault by American military and intelligence operatives that ended in the death of Bin Laden on Sunday and concluded one of history?s most extensive and frustrating manhunts.

American officials said that Bin Laden was shot in the head after he tried to resist the assault force, and that one of his sons died with him.

For nearly a decade, American military and intelligence forces had chased the specter of Bin Laden through Pakistan and Afghanistan, once coming agonizingly close and losing him in a pitched battle at Tora Bora, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. As Obama administration officials described it, the real breakthrough came when they finally figured out the name and location of Bin Laden?s most trusted courier, whom the Qaeda chief appeared to rely on to maintain contacts with the outside world.

Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier?s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

American intelligence officials said Sunday night that they finally learned the courier?s real name four years ago, but that it took another two years for them to learn the general region where he operated.

Still, it was not until August that they tracked him to the compound in Abbottabad, a medium-sized city about an hour?s drive north of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.

C.I.A. analysts spent the next several weeks examining satellite photos and intelligence reports to determine who might be living at the compound. A senior administration official said that by September the C.I.A. had decided that there was a ?strong possibility? that Bin Laden himself was hiding there.

 It was hardly the spartan cave in the mountains that many had envisioned as Bin Laden?s hiding place. Rather, it was a mansion on the outskirts of the town?s center, set on an imposing hilltop and ringed by 12-foot-high concrete walls topped with barbed wire.

The property was valued at $1 million, but it had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. Its residents were so concerned about security that they burned their trash rather putting it on the street for collection the way their neighbors did.

American officials believed that the compound, built in 2005, was designed for the specific purpose of hiding Bin Laden.

Months more of intelligence work would follow before American spies felt highly confident that it was indeed Bin Laden and his family who were hiding there ? and before President Obama determined that the intelligence was solid enough to begin planning a mission to go after the Qaeda leader.

On March 14, Mr. Obama held the first of what would be five national security meetings in the course of the next six weeks to go over plans for the operation.

The meetings, attended by only the president?s closest national security aides, took place as other White House officials were scrambling to avert a possible government shutdown over the budget.

Four more similar meetings to discuss the plan would follow, until President Obama gathered his aides one final time last Friday.

At 8:20 that morning, Mr. Obama met with Thomas Donilon, the national security adviser; John O. Brennan, the counterterrorism adviser; and other senior aides in the Diplomatic Room at the White House. The president was traveling to Alabama later that morning to witness the damage from last week?s tornadoes. But first he had to approve the final plan to send operatives into the compound where the administration believed that Bin Laden was hiding. 

Even after the president signed the formal orders authorizing the raid, Mr. Obama chose to keep Pakistan?s government in the dark about the operation.

?We shared our intelligence on this compound with no other country, including Pakistan,? a senior administration official said.

It is no surprise that the administration chose not to tell Pakistani officials. The United States never really believed the Pakistanis? insistence that Bin Laden was not in their country. American diplomatic cables in recent years show constant American pressure on Pakistan to help find and kill Bin Laden.

Asked about the Qaeda leader?s whereabouts during a Congressional visit to Islamabad in September 2009, the Pakistani interior minister, Rehman Malik, replied that he ??had no clue,? but added that he did not believe that Bin Laden was in the area. Bin Laden had sent his family to Iran, so it made sense that he might have gone there himself, Mr. Malik argued. Alternatively, he might be hiding in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, or perhaps he was already dead, he added, according to a cable from the American Embassy that is among the collection obtained by WikiLeaks.

The mutual suspicions have grown worse in recent months, particularly after Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. contractor, shot two men on a crowded street in Lahore in January.

On Sunday, the small team of American military and intelligence operatives poured out of helicopters for their attack on the heavily fortified compound.

American officials gave few details about the raid itself, other than to say that a firefight broke out shortly after the commandos arrived and that Bin Laden had tried to ?resist the assault force.?

When the shooting had stopped, Bin Laden and three other men lay dead. One woman, whom an American official said had been used as a human shield by one of the Qaeda operatives, was also killed.

The Americans collected Bin Laden?s body and loaded it onto one of the remaining helicopters, and the assault force hastily left the scene.

Obama administration officials said that one of helicopters went down during the mission because of mechanical failure, but that no Americans were injured.

It was 3:50 Eastern time on Sunday afternoon when President Obama received the news that Bin Laden had tentatively been identified, most likely after a series of DNA tests.

The Qaeda leader?s body was flown to Afghanistan, the country where he made his fame fighting and killing Soviet troops during the 1980s. 

From there, American officials said, the body was buried at sea.

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