quick start The beginning of The magazine, where arTicles are small
12 MAXIMUMPC JANUARY 2007
E
ver have a talking doll when you were a kid?
(Come on, guys, there were some pull-string GI
Joes.) Well, play that sound in your head and you’ll
comprehend the audio quality of Miglia’s Microsound.
How fitting that when we plugged it into an editor’s
iPod Nano and hit play, the first song up was “The
Hokey Pokey.” $30, http://www.miglia.comMicrosoft retreats froM
Vista restrictions
PC home builders and upgraders were
rightly outraged at news that Vista’s origi-
nal EULA would only allow users to “reas-
sign the license to another device one
time.” Fortunately Microsoft has seen fit
to appease this fervent yet relatively small
part of the customer base by adopting
more reasonable wording: “You may unin-
stall the software and install it on another
device for your use.” Guess Microsoft isn’t
totally evil, after all.PayPal Pyrotechnics
PayPal likely would have preferred a thor-
ough TPing to the explosion that rocked
its San Jose offices on Halloween. The
powerful bomb blast shattered
windows and prompted
the evacuation of 1,
employees, but caused no
other damage or injuries.
As of press time, no one
has been implicated in
the attack.riaa foiled
A California woman’s successful defense
in a lawsuit brought by the RIAA could
make it much more difficult for the orga-
nization to punish file sharers. Tammie
Marson established reasonable doubt
about her alleged illegal downloading
practices by claiming that her wireless
network was not secure and thus vul-
nerable to use by interlopers. The RIAA
dropped its case.youtube to Go
Soon you can have all the delights of
YouTube on your cell phone. The company
recently announced that it plans to make its
video-sharing features avail-
able to mobile phones
by the end of 2007.
Currently, it’s possible
to upload video from
a mobile device to the
YouTube website on
a PC, but in the next
generation, users
will be able to send
and receive video
between phones with
a subscription.funsizenews
Adobe Gives;Mozilla Grows
If understanding the relation-
ship between JavaScript, a vir-
tual machine runtime engine,
and ECMAScript makes your
eyes glaze over faster than a
K-Fed concert, try the cave-
man approach: Adobe donate
source code, Firefox run faster.
Christmas came early for
the Mozilla Foundation, with
Santa Adobe coughing up
nearly 135,000 lines of source
code to the open-source
initiative in early November.
The gift, Adobe’s ActionScript
Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2),
processes ActionScript lan-
guage as part of the compa-
ny’s Flash Player 9.
The current AVM
comes with a new Just-
In-Time compiler, which
speeds up the ActionScript-
code-to-machine-instruc-
tions conveyer belt. Since
ActionScript and JavaScript
are close siblings under the
ECMAScript standard, this not
only allows AVM2 to run both
Flash and JavaScript-based
applications, but it transfers
the benefits as well.
“What that means for
users,” says Frank Hecker,
the Mozilla Foundation’s
executive director, “is when
they go to these fancy-nancy
web 2.0 applications—Gmail,
Yahoo Mail, or some other app
based on technologies like
AJAX—they’ll be able to get
faster performance.”
As Firefox is partly writ-
ten in JavaScript, the increase
could show up in the browser
itself. Adobe has allegedly
seen speedups of up to 10
times in magnitude, based on
the company’s internal test-
ing of ActionScript applica-
tions under the new AVM2.
Users have a bit of
time before the Mozilla-
based AVM2, code-named
“Tamarin,” heads into the
wild. It’s expected to reach
computer desktops in 2008.Miglia Microsound
Steam Picks up...um...Steam
More publishers sign on to distribute titles via Valve’s
digital serviceY
ou remember Steam, the little service Valve rolled
out a couple years ago to distribute its games online,
right? Well, it’s come a long way since its single-title
launch with Counter-Strike. Steam now sports a catalog of
nearly 100 titles, with more games from various publishers
coming every day.
In fact, publishers are seeing a new use for Steam:
Majesco and Activision are making parts of their back
catalogs available on the service. It’s nice that classic
games like Psychonauts and Call of Duty 2 will be avail-
able for easy purchase and download—especially after
they’ve fallen off retail shelves. But we’d much prefer to
see games made available for digital download the same
day they’re available at retail, like we saw with Medieval II:
Total War and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.now on steam, more than just Valve games!&DIS