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SAN FRANCISCO Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it will make Xbox 360 video games developed by players available for download through the console’s online service.The new service will double the size of the Xbox 360 game library, to 1,000 games within a year of its launch, scheduled for this holiday season, the company said.To distribute a game on the Xbox Live service, game creators must use Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio software, which requires a $99 per-year subscription, or be an XNA Creators Club member. Each game will be vetted for quality and appropriateness by the online community itself.Creators Club members will be able to test a beta version starting this spring.In addition, Microsoft announced that game developers also will be able to build games for the software maker’s Zune digital media players.”The time has come for the games industry to open its doors to all game creators, enabling anyone to share their creations with the world,” John Schappert, a vice president of gaming at Microsoft, told an audience of about 6,000 game developers at a San Francisco conference.Microsoft also said this week it will give students free access to its XNA Game Studio 2.0, its video game development program.The moves to encourage Xbox 360 game development come as the company faces fierce competition from Nintendo Co. and Sony Corp.’s PlayStation in the game console market. Nintendo last year unveiled its own game development tool, called WiiWare.Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Lazard Capital Markets, said he didn’t expect the Xbox download service to appeal to mass-market consumers, but it could encourage independent developers to create Xbox 360 games.”This would appeal to the more independent developers, people who want to break into the market, and get them started on the Xbox,” Sebastian said. “It makes the development and distribution of video games more accessible.”But Microsoft would not say Wednesday whether the downloads would be free, or if the service would generate revenue for game developers.That’s a key detail independent game creator Phil Fish says he wants to know. Fish, who with two others just launched Montreal-based Polytron Corp., has developed a game called “Fez” using XNA software.He said even with Microsoft’s tools, gaming development will never be easy. He hopes to reap $10 per download on his game, using his own Web site.”I wouldn’t like to give a year of work away just because Microsoft allows us to do it,” Fish said.Like musicians who struggle to get discovered by big recording studios, independent game developers traditionally have struggled to prove themselves to a publishing company to get a distribution contract.The new Xbox download service could create a centralized platform for developers to show off their wares without the contract worries, said Jason DeGroot, also with Polytron. Under Microsoft’s plan, developers would still own the rights to the games they post.”It’s about giving independent developers a mass, wide-appeal audience,” DeGroot said.Xbox Live has 10 million subscribers who could potentially play and rate the games.But DeGroot fears the service could get bombarded with lower-quality games.”It’s not easy to make games. They might be shooting themselves in the foot,” DeGroot said.

IBM has launched its Jazz.net development platform to the open-source community. Earlier the Web 2.0-based platform was only available to IBM customers, academics and partners. But now any developer can contribute to software under development at Jazz.net.IBM with an open Jazz.net and commercial community will allow companies on a global level to cooperate transparently and also communicate with each other, thereby overcoming the barriers.In addition, the Company also announced, IBM Rational Team Concert Express. The software is the first offering developed on the Jazz.net platform and will be available later this year. The beta 2 version includes Web dashboards, so that team members can see project status data like progress on work items and project health. It also allows teams to use DB2 and other databases to host the IBM Rational Team Concert repository. The software is based on open-standard middleware, including IBM WebSphere, IBM Lotus Sametime, Apache Tomcat, Apache Derby and Jabber.

JetBrains, creator of Java IDE - IntelliJ IDEA, has released Java IDE 7.0.2. The new version 7.0.2 is a bug fix release. IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.2 comes with Spring and Hibernate support, Web Services, Maven and ClearCase integration, and improved support for EJB, JSP, HTML, CSS and XML. IntelliJ IDEA has tools for the development of Web applications, Web services support and enhancements for dynamic languages.New features in IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 include: Spring and hibernate support Web and enterprise development Performance improvements Eclipse and maven integration VCS integration Dynamic languages Debugger Dependency structure matrix (DSM) Other productivity %26 usability features

Aaron Houston, Program Coordinator for JUGs and Java Champions, pointed out that there is a new Student Portal on the Sun Developer Network, and could be a helpful resource for both high school and college students.Sun SPOT kits are available for price down to USD 300/kit for students and teachers/professors. The discount can ask about on the Sun SPOT Forums. There is a competition to submit a proposal for a Sun SPOT idea and you could receive a Free SPOT to implement it.The Sun SPOT Device is a small, wireless, battery powered experimental platform. It is programmed almost entirely in Java to allow regular programmers to create projects that used to require specialized embedded system development skills. The hardware platform includes a range of built-in sensors as well as the ability to easily interface to external devices.Rick opined on this advancement by saying that nvesting in resources for students is the best way to ensure another generation of well-equipped young developers and extend the lifetime of a platform like Java.

BEIJING A Chinese land rights activist went on trial for subversion Tuesday for protesting the Beijing Olympics in a case highlighting China’s efforts to clamp down on dissent before the Summer Games.Yang Chunlin, led into court in handcuffs and leg irons, pleaded not guilty in the hearing before the Intermediate People’s Court in the northeastern city of Jiamusi, said his lead attorney, Li Fangping.Yang, a laid-off factory worker, became involved with farmers outside Jiamusi demanding redress for farmland taken from them by officials for development. He gathered 10,000 signatures for an open letter demanding land rights for farmers. To rally support, he posted the letter on the Internet with the title: “We want human rights, not the Olympics.”Yang’s case is among the most highly charged before the August Games, challenging the Communist government’s ambitions to use the Olympics to boost its legitimacy.The official charge against him - inciting subversion of state power - is one commonly used against political dissidents, and in eight months in detention, Yang has been given little contact with his lawyer or family, who have said he was tortured.Much of the nearly five-hour trial session was spent arguing about whether Yang’s Olympic protest slogan counted as subversion, said an account posted on a human rights Web site that was corroborated by Li.”Debate centered on ‘We want human rights, not the Olympics,’” said Li. He said two types of evidence were presented against Yang: one involving the Olympics petition, the other articles Yang had written which allegedly attacked the socialist system and state leaders.Li said his defense team argued that the land the farmers lost had been seized illegally because it was taken without the Cabinet’s permission as required by regulations.The Intermediate Court on Monday reversed an earlier decision to hold the trial behind closed doors and instead opened it to the public, a move that likely reflected Beijing’s nervousness over the attention the case has drawn from overseas media and human rights groups.”This decision came from Beijing. They want a trial that looks good,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong. “The charges are clearly in contravention of international standards, criminalizing speech.”Calls to the Jiamusi court seeking comment were not answered.Yang was detained in July and formally arrested a month later. His sister said earlier that he was tortured while in detention, with his arms and legs stretched and chained to the corners of an iron bed.China has been cracking down on dissent ahead of the Olympics. Earlier this month, a Chinese court sentenced democracy activist Lu Gengsong to four years in prison for “inciting to subvert state power.”Another well-known activist, Hu Jia, was taken from his home in December and arrested on similar charges. He is in custody, and there is no word on when he will face trial.

IBM and Fair Isaac have expanded their cooperative efforts into a joint strategic and global marketing alliance. Under an agreement announced recently, Fair Isaac’s enterprise decision management (EDM) solutions, which typically support decision-making in industries such as finance, insurance and healthcare, will be centered on IBM’s service-oriented architecture (SOA) products.”Both Fair Isaac and IBM fully embrace and support SOA to deliver open-standards business applications to any number of users regardless of their existing technology infrastructure” said Mark Hanny, vice president of strategic partnerships, IBM.Both companies will work together to build the next generation of Fair Isaac’s enterprise decision management applications on IBM’s DB2, WebSphere, Rational, and Lotus product lines. The two companies will also focus their development on applications running on IBM’s Portal and System z and p platforms.”Our joint clients can now more easily overcome one of the key challenges of implementing an SOA infrastructure to deliver Information on Demand (IOD) managing, integrating, and unlocking value from their business information and become more flexible to better compete globally,” added Hanny.The new strategic alliance agreement also grew out of a need to integrate four of Fair Isaac’s products, including Capstone (origination), Finance (account management), Debt Manager (collections and recovery) and Falcon (fraud prevention).The agreement includes joint development and co-marketing and sales of applications aimed at financial services. IBM’s Global Business Services division will provide systems integration support.

The allure of Hollywood’s biggest stars is losing out to entertainment based on microscopic circuitry and fancy software.Do you doubt it? While movie attendance has essentially been flat for six years, games for computers and video consoles have been booming.If the trend continues, many people in the entertainment industry will lose their jobs, but new types of jobs are already opening up, particularly in parts of California, which form a digital entertainment hub.”I feel a massive shift,” said Dana Settle, a venture capitalist at Greycroft Partners in Los Angeles who invests in online companies. “Movie studios are corporate behemoths. They’re going to crumble.”Movie stars Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man, Mike Myers as the voice of Shrek and Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow came out with hit sequels last year, which helped raise box office receipts in North America to $9.7 billion. But that total, which excludes shrinking DVD sales and downloads, was up a mere 2.4 percent from 2004, according to data tracker Media by Numbers.Apples-to-apples comparisons aren’t possible, but the contrasts are clear. Game industry sales, including consoles and software, totaled about $18 billion in the United States last year, up 43 percent over 2006, according to market researcher NPD Group.The first-person shooting game “Halo 3,” the hard-to-find Wii game console and the role-playing “World of Warcraft” were among the hits that contributed to those sales. Last month, Warcraft publisher Blizzard Entertainment of Irvine announced the game had 10 million subscribers.The No. 1 game even outpaced the No. 1 movie last year. “Halo 3″ brought in $170 million on its first day; “Spider-Man 3″ grossed $151 million on its first weekend.Game experts recently discussed the effects of changing entertainment choices. The impact extends from the living room to the workplace.”Studios are on the down slope, and they know it,” said Jamie Somes, senior managing director of Alexander Dunham Capital investment bank in Los Angeles. “They’re not well-positioned as organizations for the new digital environment.” He cited predictions that within five years studios will be only half to one-tenth their current size.”In studios, you can smell the fear,” Settle said. “They’re missing the creative spark. At game companies, people are psyched.”Unlike movies, modern computer-based games let viewers interact with the game’s story or with other players, said Bob Drobish, president of startup True Games Interactive, who spoke to a meeting of video game engineers at the Digital Media Center incubator in Santa Ana.Modern games often do not appeal to consumers over 30 because they tend to think of computers as one-person productivity tools - which is what they used to be, Drobish said. People under 30 take to those games more readily, he said, because they view computers as social devices for exchanging e-mails, instant messages and pictures with friends.”Computers are inherently social,” especially in the age of high-speed broadband networks, he said. New types of games tap into that quality, especially multiplayer online role-playing games such as “World of Warcraft,” he said.The development of multiplayer social games is possible because of fundamental technological improvements in computers and computer networks, said Tim Walsh, the Los Angeles-based executive vice president of in-game advertising company IGA Worldwide.”Improved software, file compression, better code, Flash animation - they’re coming together to extend the digital lifestyle,” he said.With the new appeal of games come new business opportunities - and more games in the future.- Red 5 Studios. Three game makers and executives from Blizzard - “World of Warcraft” team leader Mark Kern, art director William Petras, and Taewon Yun, who launched the game in Korea - founded Red 5 Studios in 2005 and since then have been working on their first game. With development studios in Aliso Viejo and Shanghai, China, the company’s goal is “bringing together millions of gamers across the world by creating immersive worlds, intriguing stories and compelling characters.”- Carbine Studios. Ten other former “World of Warcraft” game makers, including lead animator Kevin Beardslee, lead composer Jason Hayes and senior artist Matt Mocarski, founded Carbine Studios in Aliso Viejo. The company has 17 former Blizzard employees who are developing a multiplayer online game.- True Games Interactive. Last year, Drobish and Jeff Lujan, chief publishing officer at True Games, left executive positions at K2 to pursue their startup. They hope to launch a domestic version of a Korean game this summer.- Sleepy Giant. Last year former K2 executives Matthew Hannus and David Lee started Newport Beach-based Sleepy Giant, which runs other companies’ games rather than developing its own. The gaming opportunities aren’t limited to entrepreneurs.”A lot of good Hollywood TV and movie talent is being drawn to games” because game production can be more stable than the boom-and-bust movie business, and can even offer better fringe benefits, said Mark Friedler, founder of the GameDaily Web site. People who are moving from movies to games include digital artists and special effects experts, who tell Friedler one reason for the decision is, “I like having health insurance,” he said. Because the virtual landscapes of online worlds have grown to accommodate so many players, Walsh said, “Game companies need a tremendous amount of digital artists, physicists and designers.” Friedler cited two problems new game companies face - rising costs and growing competition for consumers‘ time. “To create a next-generation console game costs $40 million to $50 million,” he said. “That’s the same cost as a lot of movies.” With “World of Warcraft,” Blizzard changed the market, raising players’ expectations for how realistic a game will be. To accomplish that, the company spent an estimated $90 million, Drobish said. At first the budget seemed excessive, but now it looks brilliant, he said. Intense competition for consumers’ time has already affected traditional forms of entertainment. “Movies and TV are seeing a shift away from them because there are only so many hours in the day,” Walsh said. He foresees a bright future for games, but some industry observers think the same competition for people’s attention could hurt games, too. “People worry about crowding out,” Friedler said. “If someone is always on Facebook and MySpace and texting, how much time is left for games?”

The Apache Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol Components project, has released the first BETA version of HttpComponents HttpCore 4.0-beta1. This release marks the end of API instability in HttpCore. As of this release the API compatibility between minor releases in 4.x codeline will be maintained. It includes several major improvements such as enhanced HTTP message parsing API and optimized parser implementations, Java 5.0 compatibility for HttpCore NIO extensions.The focus of the development efforts will be towards providing better test coverage, documentation and performance optimizations. The HttpCore components implement the most fundamental aspects of the HTTP protocol. They are sufficient to develop basic client side and server side HTTP services with a minimal footprint and no external dependencies. HttpCore NIO extensions can be used to build asynchronous HTTP services based on non-blocking I/O model capable of handling a great number of simultaneous connections with just a few I/O threads.

BEIJING China warned Tuesday that “unbridled pressure” would worsen the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, after critics including Hollywood director Steven Spielberg accused Beijing of not doing enough to bring an end to the suffering.Spielberg quit a week ago as an artistic adviser to the opening and closing ceremonies of this summer’s Beijing Olympics, saying his conscience would not allow him to continue working with the event.China is believed to have influence over Sudanese leaders because it buys two-thirds of the African country’s oil exports. China also sells weapons to the Islamic government and defends it in the United Nations.”We shall not use unbridled pressure so as to prevent further complication of the situation,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said at a regular news briefing. “Relevant countries shall maintain patience and conduct equal dialogue to resolve the issue properly.”He did not mention Spielberg or the international criticism leveled against China.Premier Wen Jiabao detailed China’s efforts to establish peace in Darfur during a telephone call Tuesday with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a move that underscored the sensitivity of the issue.”We are willing, together with Britain, to continue to make unremitting efforts for the proper resolution of the Darfur issue,” Wen told Brown, according to an account of the conversation posted on the Chinese Foreign Ministry Web site.China was the first non-African country to dispatch peacekeepers to Darfur, and was quick to send development and humanitarian aid, Wen was reported as saying. Beijing has also played a key role in peace negotiations, he said.China’s special envoy to Darfur will be making his fourth visit to the region later this month, the Foreign Ministry announced.Peace negotiations were “obviously lagging” behind the deployment of peacekeeping forces, Liu said, calling for a speedup in the political process and efforts to persuade rebel groups to join in peace talks to end more than four years of conflict.More than 200,000 people have died after rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government.Activists have attempted to shame China by saying that inaction makes it unworthy to be an Olympics host. China has consistently said the Olympics is a sporting event and should not be linked to politics.Still, China has made significant changes to its policies in Sudan within the last year, appointing longtime diplomat Liu Guijin as a special envoy to the region and sending 140 engineers to help prepare for the arrival of African Union and United Nations peacekeepers. The efforts have earned kudos from the United States.

Microsoft’s schedule for shipping SQL Server 2008 , the upcoming new release of the company’s database software, is slipping from June 30 into the third quarter. Microsoft recently disclosed the schedule change, described by the company as a “clarification on the roadmap for SQL Server 2008,” in “The Data Platform Insider” blog on the company’s Technet Website for IT professionals.Microsoft also revealed that SQL Server 2008 would still be celebrated at the company’s big launch gala in February, along with Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. However, it won’t actually be finished until the third quarter of the year. Instead, what Microsoft will deliver at its “Heroes Happen Here” event in Los Angeles next month will be a “feature complete” community technology preview or CTP of SQL Server 2008, according to the blog. “Microsoft is excited to deliver a feature complete CTP during the Heroes Happen Here launch wave and a release candidate (RC) in Q2 calendar year 2008, with final release to manufacturing (RTM) of SQL Server 2008 expected in Q3,” the post, by Francois Ajenstat, director of SQL Server marketing, said.Once considered a technology that could only handle smaller databases, SQL Server is now running data warehouses larger than 20 TB in size, according to Microsoft. Among the areas of improvement in SQL Server 2008 besides the business intelligence capabilities are better scalability and an easier way to develop against the database via technologies like LINQ, a new querying syntax.SQL Server 2008’s delay is relatively minor, especially compared to the two-year delay for its prior version, SQL Server 2005. Development of that database was slowed by numerous security fixes. Windows Server 2008’s RTM has also been postponed several times, though it is currently expected to ship around the time of the L.A. launch. Visual Studio 2008, by contrast, was released in mid-November.