News has emerged that Valve will be releasing a demo of its 4 player co-op zombie shooter Left 4 Dead. The demo, which should be out shortly before release, will more than likely be the first two maps of the game. The two missions start outside in the streets and later lead you into a subway station.

Left 4 Dead will be out on Xbox360 and PC with rumours of a PS3 version later to follow (not confirmed by Valve). The game will be available Nov 18th on Steam and the 21st in the shops.

The search engine we all know and love has turned 10 years old today.

It’s odd to think that they’ve been around for only ten years to be honest - Google is intertwined with our online lives everywhere now. I personally use GMail, of course, Reader, Notebook, Analytics, Sitemaps, Video and Youtube, Maps and Earth, Chat - not to mention their search. In fact I can’t think of anything more convenient than everything under one Google account. How they make money I don’t think I’ll ever understand, but I guess if the advertisers want to pay the sort of money they do, who am I to argue - especially if I’m the one to benefit! Then there’s the browser & mobile OS markets with Chrome & Android respectively. The last ten years have been good for Google, and the future is looking very bright too. Happy Birthday Google!

Those of you who have read my recent post on the failings of EA support, will know that it was impossible to get through to them.

Well, I can now say the problem is solved and it is in no way down to EA’s help. A member of the team at DICE, the company behind the much anticipated Battlefield Heroes game, read my article on techsnake.com and contacted me directly through the website.

Not only were the guys courteous, helpful, and dedicated (he was still helping me at 9.30pm Stockholm time!) but after a few emails he sorted the problems and I’m able to log into the beta test forums on the site. Proof that support isn’t that difficult once you have some intelligent people behind it.

I don’t know if you’ve ever owned any EA games, and I don’t know if you’ve ever needed their support with them - but trust me, don’t bother because you are going to get nowhere fast with the support team.

I have been a long time owner of EA Sports and Electronic Arts games generally for many years. I have the Battlefield series (apart from 2142) and I’ve enjoyed the Need for Speed games (the older ones more, I must admit.) I have had problems with games in the past, but never had to use EA’s support - and I’m counting my blessings now.

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Think of the unhappiest times with your computer.. What happened during those times? What would cause your face to freeze and your jaw to drop? In my experience it has almost always been because data was lost. It’s normally the realisation that everything you had was gone - when you stare blankly at the computer for 5 minutes dumb-struck. Maybe you went into a folder in your My Documents that was, until yesterday, full of those really important files you were doing for work. Or maybe you went to power on your PC and you had one of those horrible error messages from Windows, that essentially means “your system has gone bye-bye.”

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Pushing around the internetz, minding my own business, I fell upon an old Gizmodo article of a year ago about a cat that you can buy, from Japan. No ordinary cat, no, but a robotic electrocute your-family-and-take-over-the-house sort of kitty. Scarily realistic, you would wonder if children would be able to sleep at night after seeing this thing for more than 5 minutes.. But then you find out, what’s even stranger is that this metallic feline is aimed at people that can’t own animals, for whatever reason. Kill it I say, and save the free world.

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With news that Google have just got that little bit closer to providing users of Google’s Maps and Earth a more detailed than ever view of where we live, I wonder if it’s all such a good thing..

The GeoEye satellite, 423 miles about the Earth, peers down as you’re outside doing the gardening. Little do you know that while you prune your petunias, the large lens of a hi-resolution camera is watching your every move, down to a 50cm resolution. What does that mean to the average person?

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I’m not sure if this is a Microhoo story or not, but I do know that Yahoo’s shares have dropped to a 5 year low - at what point does this equate to “Shareholder Value” exactly Mr. Yang? Of course, The Register were one of the first (even ahead of me!) to jump on that particular bandwagon!

I’m the sort of person that looks at something and wonders why it isn’t as good as something else I have. Example: In your modern browser you have tabs, and you can click-drag these to reorganise. Something you don’t need to do that often, but it’s nice to have the option. So I wondered why Windows doesn’t have this functionality for the Taskbar?

Well it turns out Jay Erox thought the same thing, and wrote a utility to fix it. Download Taskbar Shuffle (XP & Vista) and you can drag your Taskbar buttons around to your hearts content. My life is complete again - for the time being at least.

I know, we shouldn’t be getting the pallbearers ready just yet, but after the release of Google’s Chrome it does raise the question of how it will affect Firefox & the Mozilla Foundation.

The Foundation is largely funded by Google so it presents a complicated situation for the two groups. On one side you have Google, with an open-source, Google branded browser - and on the other you have a foundation that receives funding from Google, with their own browser already available and widely adopted. Competition you could say. So can Google justify investing in Mozilla when they have Chrome?

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