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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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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Georgia’s Valdosta State University has updated its network with software that can pinpoint students who use P2P software. The university is committed to stop file-sharing on its network even if that results in prison sentences for students. Offenders will be disciplined by the school and then handed over to the police, the university has announced.
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With the increasing amount of bandwidth we're all sucking down these days, it's no surprise that we often feel like our Internet speeds just aren't fast enough. But how fast are our connections? And how does one country stack up against another? Royal Pingdom has released some data today, based on information from the CDN provider Akamai that compares connections speeds internationally. The report looks at the "real world speeds" (not just what service providers advertise) for people in the 50 countries with the most Internet users - all told 1.8 billion Internet users.

Of the top 10 countries, 3 are from Asia (the top 3, in fact), and 7 are from Europe. Coming in at number 11 is Canada (4.73 Mbits/s), beating the U.S. (4.60 Mbits/s) at number 12. There's quite a range between the number 1 country's speed - South Korea at just under 17 Mbit/s - and the speed of Internet in Iran, 0.41 Mbits/s.

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