Week in a review: Big brands, big money

by Gary Illyes

Quite interesting week. At the beginning of the week we learned from Lisa Respers a bit about the infamous rapper, 50 Cent. If you start thinking about girls dancing on the table or his brand new Escalade, you are wrong. This CNN article shed some light on on the rapper’s gaming habits. No, he doesn’t play Half Life nor World of Warcraft. He plays games like “Tetris”, “Pac-Man” and all-time favorite “Super Mario Brothers.”

The same day a CNET article by Dawn Kawamoto shed some light on Google’s finances. But this time not on its server costs or how much did they spent on the food for their employees. It’s a much interesting subject: the article covers how much the execs of Google got in bonuses. I tell you in advance that the total sum is a ten figure number. Just as an example, Patrick Pichette received a $1.24 million bonus for his five months of work. I’m not jealous, but am sure I could do one-two things with that cold cash. Head on to CNET to read the full article.

The next day Microsoft announces in a press release the availability of two new games, sorry, applications for Facebook and MySpace: “Hexic” and “Chess”. I could have swear that these were games once. Oh, sorry. My bad: these are applications for the two social networks which can be used for playing. Or rather games which were transformed in applications to let people play with each other on the social networks. What a chaos.

Still 4th of March, AP reports that Facebook revamps its homepage. This wouldn’t be that interesting, but the infamous social networking service probably will take a cue from Twitter, which IS interesting. Let me clarify: if I start to produce light bulbs and I say that I invented the light bulb, I’m an impostor. But if am big and strong and I say I invented the Troy Square cooling solution, that’s OK.

By the way, the Troy Square cooling solution is an Asus invention. If we’re already at Asus and if you are a gamer, you will love this: Asus has put together a PC designed specifically for gamers. It’s equipped with an Intel Core i7 processor, three-channel DDR3 memory and a GeForce GTX285 graphics card. If that wouldn’t be enough or you miss the topping cherry from the above composition, it also has a SupremeFX X-Fi Audio Card. The bonus is an inbuilt fingerprint scanner. The system is called ASUS ROG CG6190, you should see it on the left.

One of the most shocking and terrible news of the week was that two Windows 7 testers found a new feature in the non-public build of the beta OS. My bad again. While that would be a news alone, this is about something else. So, there’s a new feature in Windows 7 which affects almost the whole population of the Earth: Internet Explorer 8 can be removed altogether from the OS! Head to AP to read the whole story.

Same day I’ve learned from a Reuters story that sending SMS in Germany can be extremely expensive and the bill can be even $2,300. Sounds weird? Well, if you know the whole story it turns out that it’s not that weird at all, because the sum is a fine “issued” for a man by the German court because the he sent a quite antisemitic message to his friend who’s home was incidentally searched by the police. Read the whole story, it’s interesting.