General Gaming Article

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Microsoft Gets Anti-Trust Approval for Skype Posted: 19 Jun 2011 11:26 AM PDT Microsoft's $8.5 billion proposed acquisition of Skype is one step closer to being a done deal today, with regulators officially giving the Redmond based software giant the green light to proceed with its merger plans. The deal has been stuck in regulatory limbo since it was announced in May, however analysts almost universally agreed that it was unlikely to raise many red flags given how competitive the VOIP space is these days. It's still somewhat unclear at this point what Microsoft plans to do with Skype, but at least in the short term, Microsoft has openly stated that it plans to continue supporting competing platforms such as OSX and iPhone/Android. Additional tie-ins to Microsoft Office are expected, as is a Windows Phone version. Finding a way to make it profitable wouldn't hurt either.

Future Versions of Chrome Will Predict Your Next Link & Pre-Render Pages Automatically Posted: 19 Jun 2011 10:46 AM PDT Google engineers are known for doing whatever it takes to shave precious milliseconds off of page loads, but it's pretty rare to see them steal a page from the past in pursuit of their goal. Upcoming releases of Chrome however will do just that, adding link pre-fetching/pre-rendering to the latest editions of the company's flagship browser.  Web accelerator tools with this capability have been available since Windows 95, but admittedly their popularity waned a bit when people made the jump from dial up to DSL. In typical Google fashion however, the algorithms behind their unique form of link scrapping has been tweaked considerably to make them more web friendly, and useful.  Here is a quick snipped from the Google blog post describing the process (or just watch the video). "What is prerendering? Sometimes a site may be able to predict with reasonable accuracy which link the user is most likely to click on next--for example, the 'next page' link in a multi-page news article. In those cases, it would be faster and better for the user if the browser could get a head start loading the next page so that when the user clicks the page is already well on its way to being loaded. That's the fundamental idea behind prerendering. The browser fetches all of the sub-resources and does all of the work necessary to display the page. In many cases, the site simply seems to load instantly when the user clicks. Although Google.com is the most high profile site to use prerendering, it's a technology that is available to any site. Triggering prerendering well, however, is challenging to do correctly and will only be useful to a handful of sites that have a high degree of certainty of where their users will click next. Triggering prerendering for the wrong site could lead to the link the user did click on loading more slowly." The feature is currently only available in the developer editions of Chrome, but when a feature makes this much sense, expect it to show up in the stable build sooner, rather than later.

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