When the first Windows operating system was introduced by Microsoft, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, John Hughes was introducing touching teen stereotypes in "The Breakfast Club," and a young singer named Madonna was hitting the road with "The Virgin Tour." Twenty five years later, Windows, Reagan, Hughes, and Madonna are still very much at the center of our tech, political, and pop culture discussions.
Since we are a technology site, however, let's take a moment to focus on the sheer breadth of Bill Gates' achievement with Windows and to ask: how long can this go on? Now in its seventh major version, Windows can be found on about 9 out of every 10 of the world PCs, its server version is on 70 percent of the world's servers, and, of course, Gates is the richest American, and, until recently, of the world. Microsoft is the world's largest software company thanks largely to the Windows franchise and has extended its products to everything from gaming consoles and mobile phones to corporate financial software and databases.
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A report from TorrentFreak cites, amongst other statistics, the fact that the torrent file for the real time strategy Starcraft 2: The Wings of Liberty has been downloaded more than 2.3 million times since the game has been released in July of this year, leading to a total of 15.77 Petabytes of data downloaded.

This makes the game the most pirated so far this year, although by the end of the year Call of Duty: Black Ops, which has been recently released for the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and the PC, could take the number one condition based on the interest players have shown since day, picking up more than 5 million legitimate copies in the first day on sale to make the most successful video game launch.
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Does the loss of LimeWire have you down? Well it really shouldn't. The close of LimeWire had zero tangible detriment to the file-sharing community. If anything, it actually spurred innovation on several fronts: renewed focus on FrostWire and the arrival of LimeWire: Pirate Edition. The latter is a new entry into the file-sharing fray, whose arrival was spurred by the inoperability of the most recent versions of the official LimeWire client. Although LimeWire withstood the test of time, it didn't quite pass the final exam. That distinct honor goes to SoulSeek - one of the oldest P2P applications still thriving after all these years.
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Google Chrome OS is one of Google's most ambitious projects to date and has the potential to change desktop and mobile computing in the long run. But, with Android seeing huge success, many wondered if Chrome OS really had a future. In this context, the apparent delay of the operating system doesn't bode well.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit, Google CEO Eric Schmidt only touched on Chrome OS when asked, this despite the fact that the web-based operating system was supposed to launch this fall or by the end of the year at the latest.
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Microsoft made several big announcements Monday related to social games, including a unified social system across all its web-based gaming platforms, an overhaul of MSN Games, international expansion for Bing Games and a deal with CrowdStar, the second biggest social games publisher.
You can see the new social features — which are called Microsoft Game Hub, and include leaderboards and Facebook integration — by visiting the online preview of the new MSN Games. Microsoft’s goal is to connect you with your social gaming friends regardless of whether you’re using MSN Games, Bing or Windows Live Messenger; they don’t have to use the same portal as you to play with you or see your profile data.
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