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Life as a single billionaire can be tricky. Let's say you want to set up a MySpace page to interact with your Hollywood pals. How do you inject it with your personality without revealing your true identity to anyone else who might stumble across it?

Paul Allen appears to have given it a try, although we're about to spoil the secret. We've come across a MySpace profile page, under the screen name "Merman," that contains tell-tale signs of being the Microsoft co-founder's covert online home.

To be clear, this is not one of those fake celebrity pages that people set up on social-networking sites. Instead, it seems to be an attempt by Allen himself to masquerade as a common MySpace user.

[UPDATE: The profile has been switched to private since we first posted this item. Continue reading for details of what we saw.]

First, there's the profile pic, showing a man playing a classic Fender guitar across his midsection. The face is cropped out, but it looks a lot like Allen enjoying one of his favorite pastimes. Even the ring on the right hand looks like one Allen has been known to wear. And the "interests" section lists many of Allen's favorite musicians, starting with Jimi Hendrix.

Continuing down the page, "Merman" identifies himself as as a single, straight Aquarius who wants children "someday" and attended "some college." (Allen dropped out of Washington State University before going on to found Microsoft with Bill Gates, another college dropout.) The background picture is of a man scuba diving. Even behind the mask, it's pretty clear who that is.

Of course, there are the obligatory fake details, such as Merman's age (102) and hometown (Timbuktu, Mali).

But the real clue to Merman's identity is contained in the public messages along the right rail of the site. On Jan. 21 of this year, several of Merman's friends made a point of logging on and wishing him a happy birthday. Yep, you guessed it. That just happens to be Allen's birthday.

Sorry, Paul. There's always Facebook.

[Update: Here's a screen grab from the profile page.]


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Apple:

Install the free iPhone 2.2 Software Update and get Google Street View, public transit and walking directions, and more.

What’s in this update:

• Enhancements to Maps
  - Google Street View
  - Public transit and walking directions
  - Display address of dropped pins
  - Share location via email
• Decrease in call setup failures and dropped calls
• Enhancements to Mail
  Resolved isolated issues with scheduled fetching of email
  Improved formatting of wide HTML email
• Podcasts are now available for download in iTunes application (over Wi-Fi and cellular network)
• Improved stability and performance of Safari
• Improved sound quality of Visual Voicemail messages
• Pressing Home button from any Home screen displays the first Home screen
• Preference to turn on/off auto-correction in Keyboard Settings

Details on the features

Google Street View - Street View takes you on a virtual walking tour: Navigate street-level photographs of places you've located in Maps.

Public Transit and Walking Directions - Get walking directions, find public transit schedules, check fares, and estimate your travel time.

Share Location - Tap the Share Location button to send an email that includes a Google Maps URL.

Podcasts - Get access to millions of free podcasts on the iTunes Store via Wi-Fi or your cellular network.

Safari Improvements - A new search-friendly user interface, better performance, and more stability make Safari even easier to use.

Home Screen Shortcut - Take a shortcut from any Home screen back to your first Home screen by pressing the Home button.

It works for the iPod touch as well, of course. And there are apparently a lot of security fixes as well.

Ars does a little digging to find out more about Microsoft's new security-related product, codenamed Morro. We tell you what we found out and where we met roadblocks erected by Microsoft.

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As an integral part of the move from Windows Vista to Windows 7, Microsoft has introduced a new model of interaction (the Natural User Interface), and delivered changes to the graphical user interface to accommodate the NUI. On the surface of the next iteration of the Windows client, one of the first traditional Windows components ... (read more)

In a blog post, Microsoft’s Cesar Menendez provides an update based on the wide range of questions he’s gotten about the new 10 free song per month perk that’s part of the Zune Pass subscription. One bit really caught my eye:

1. What’s the catch here?
No catch. You get everything you always got with your Zune Pass (i.e. unlimited access to Marketplace subscription tracks, for as long as you maintain your subscription), plus your choice of 10 tracks to keep every month.

This isn’t true. In fact, there are quite a number of gotchas attached to this service. And Cesar even hits on a few of them in later parts of this same post. That is …

No rollover

There is no rollover of the ten downloads from one month to the next. Download your selected ten tracks each month; next month you’ll be able to download ten more.

How do you know you have credit?

You don’t. You do this…

Right-click on the track you want, and select ‘buy’ or ‘add to cart’. If you have a Zune Pass, each month you will have a ten-item credit in your account to use for this.

Are the free tracks in WMA or in MP3 format?

That depends on the song. About 90% of Marketplace tracks are available in DRM-free MP3 format. So chances are you’ll be getting a drm-free mp3.

This isn’t true. Right now, only two-thirds of the songs on Zune Marketplace are MP3 instead of WMA. The press release reads: “With the addition of tracks from UMG and Sony BMG, Zune will soon offer over 90 percent of its music in the MP3 format.” Soon isn’t the same as now. And in my real-world experience on the store, there are still plenty of WMA tracks. Which, by the way, are not called out in any way. For example, the songs I’m trying to buy here are all WMA, not MP3. See how it tells you that? Oh, wait. It doesn’t.

The biggest problem

The biggest problem, of course, is that the Zune software doesn’t alert you to the fact that you have 10 free song credits in the default application window, as iTunes does, incidentally. You have to know that you do, and know when the credit appears. Is it every calendar month? Every 30 days from the date of your service starting? Who knows? Certainly, Microsoft’s not telling us.

Oh well. It’s still cool that we have 10 free songs per month now. And it certainly isn’t a big deal to fix the issues I raise here. Hopefully they will do soon.

Just don’t believe the “no catch” baloney. You have to do a lot of legwork to take advantage of this functionality.

It was on November 20, 1985 that Microsoft started shipping the Windows operating system. This means that Windows turned 23 years old this week, with the Redmond company keeping the celebrations down to a minimum, namely, to a few disparate mentions of the event. On Windows' 23rd birthday, the platform evolved well beyond the desktop, although the Windows client continues to be the heart and soul of Microsoft.

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Between September and October, Internet Explorer dropped by a quarter of a percent: from 71.52 percent to 71.27 percent (quite a small drop for IE, compared to other months). Firefox has rebounded, jumping by 0.51 percent (from 19.46 percent to 19.97 percent), Safari dropped a minor 0.08 percent (from 6.65 percent to 6.57 percent), Opera grabbed the number four spot back by gaining 0.06 (0.69 percent to 0.75 percent) while Chrome dropped 0.04 percent (from 0.78 percent to 0.74 percent).

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After a little break due to a very heavy work schedule, we’re back with Part 9 of this mini-series explaining how to create a Web Messenger control that you can just drop into your web sites. It’s hard to believe that we’re currently on Part 9 of this series of tutorials. In the last part we discussed Groups within Web Messenger. Users can create their own groups and place contacts within these groups, e.g. Co-Workers, Friends, Family etc. Now that we’ve got groups, it’s now time to place the actual contacts within the appropriate group.



...(read more)

As soon as the system requirements for Windows Vista were made available, the operating system was cataloged as a resource hog. Beyond being CPU- and RAM-hungry, Vista also managed to grab an unprecedented part of the hard drive, requiring for the high-end versions a 40GB HDD, with at least 15 GB of available space just to install. Furthermore, even a clean install of Windows Vista takes full advantage of all those free 15 GB of disk space. The actual Vista code is, however, just a ver... (read more)

It's only via the official channels, subject to the translucent filtering of Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, that Microsoft is pointing to a period of time by the end of January 2010 as being the general availability of Windows 7. In contrast, unofficial indications, as well as the crumbs that slip through the Win7 GA feats, deliver a launch date ahead of the end of 2009. In fact, Microsoft itself is offering confirmation that ... (read more)