When you think about the black market, I’m sure the majority of you will think of prohibition days.  When alcohol was made illegal, it did two things: It made the bad guys more money, and it put the average joe in a dangerous position while trying to acquire it.  Bring in the 21^stcentury. Sure, there still is a black market… but come on, who is afraid of mobsters anymore? Today, we have a gaming black market. It has been around for years, but will it survive? With more and more games moving towards auction houses, could game companies “tame” the gaming black market?

In the old days of gaming on the internet, we spent most of our online time playing hearts, spades… whatever we could do while connected to the internet. As the years went by, better and better games came about. Then, suddenly, interactive multiplayer games came into the picture. These interactive games, mainly MMORPGS, allowed for characters to pick up and keep randomly generated objects known as “loot”. This evolution of gaming created the black market.

In the eyes of the software companies, the game is only being leased/rented by the end user. You don’t actually have any rights to the game. This is where the market becomes black.  The software companies don’t want you making money of “virtual” goods that are housed on the software or servers of the game you are playing on.  The software companies, at this point, started to get smarter.

Where there is a demand…

Once again Java tops C as the number one sought after programming language on the internet.  According TIOBE Programming Community Index for February 2013 and five search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu, Java regained its position after being bumped by C in May 2012.

Despite the recent urging by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security of computer users to disable or uninstall Java due to a flaw in Runtime Environment (JRE) 7, Java, has increased its market share of all languages by (+2.03%) in the past six months. The jump in Java’s popularity does not come as a surprise as the Android OS claims massive success in the mobile space.  The top twelve programming languages listed in the index are:

1.  Java
2.  C
3.  Objective-C 
4.  C++
5.  C#
6.  PHP
7.  Python
8.  (Visual) Basic
9.  Perl
10.  Ruby
11. Java Script
12. Visual Basic.NET

Also rising, Python and PHP which are competing to becoming the most popular interpreted language.

The iconic software company that is based in King County Washington has been getting almost universally slammed from it's recent Los Angeles press announcement about its entry into the hardware business with the convertible laptop/tablet known as Surface.

Certainly I can see the point that it is now competing with its hardware vendors/partners. Intel has done a good job in the arena creating 'reference designs' without competing with its partners.

There is another viewpoint which seems to be ignored. The cold facts are Microsoft is a public company. This puts Microsoft in a legal position of doing the most it can to return value to its shareholders. Failure to do so means somebody is going to jail.

Microsoft has a vision, which at the end of the day is, a certain way to get enough people to see enough value to hand over their money, to fulfill their fiduciary duty.

Smart Project Management –Best Practices of Good Managers

Project management could be one of the easiest jobs on the planet, and could also be the worst nightmare. The difference between the two extremes depends on smart management of a project. According to the project management institute, there are five phases in project management - Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling, and Closing.

Every manager has his own style of project management. But there are a lot of contributing factors that result in a successfully managed project. These factors vary from project to project, but they all contain some common elements.

1. Setting SMART Goals