Economic & Technology News

The FCC says that a lack of high-speed Internet access in U.S. homes is a detriment to economic growth.
(CNN) — The U.S. Federal Communications Commission released a national “broadband plan” Tuesday that aims to give 90 percent of Americans access to affordable, high-speed Internet by 2020.

“This is not something that is nice for us to do; it is everyone’s right,” FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said at a commission meeting Tuesday.

The plan calls for billions of dollars in programs to extend fiber-optic Internet cables into new corners of rural America and to educate people about why they need the Web and how they can learn to use it.

The FCC says that if the U.S. fails to speed up Internet connections and make them accessible to more people, the economy will suffer, and unconnected Americans will be left without the information they need to function in a digital society. Many job applications, for example, no longer exist in paper form.

The much-awaited plan will be “revenue-neutral,” the FCC says. The commission plans to sell 500 megahertz of newly available spectrum for broadband use over the next decade, which it says will pay for any new costs.

Most of that spectrum, 300 megahertz worth, will be made available to wireless Internet providers over the next five years, the FCC plan says.

Other expenses will be covered by transferring funds currently used for other telecommunications into programs that promote broadband Internet expansion. The plan would move $15.5 billion into a fund that aims to extend high-speed Internet network into rural areas.

A recent FCC survey (PDF) found that about 5 percent of American homes are in places where broadband Internet connections are not available.

The webmaster without the high-speed Web

America’s Internet is widely criticized as slow by global standards, and according to the FCC, 35 percent of people in the U.S. do not have access to high-speed Internet in their homes.

The FCC says its plan would give 100 million American households Internet connections that transfer data at a rate of 100 megabits per second. Each community in the U.S. also would get access to at least one “ultra-high-speed” connection, with transfer rates of 1 gigabit per second.

Those speeds are far faster than current connections, which average about 3.9 megabits per second, according to the Internet monitor Akamai.

CNNMoney: FCC solutions may be too weak

Although the Internet was developed in the United States, the U.S. has only the 18th-fastest Web connections in the world, behind countries like South Korea, which leads the world with 14.6 megabit-per-second data transfer rates, Akamai says.

The FCC’s plan would have to be approved by Congress to go into effect.

The country’s broadband plan was required as part of President Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which allocated $7.2 billion to broadband-related initiatives.

The FCC’s plan has been criticized as not doing enough to create competition among broadband providers, which might lower costs of high-speed Internet connections.

“The United States needs to step it up and see what’s been going on around the world,” James Losey, program associate in the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, told CNNMoney.com.

“The challenge is, we don’t have competition: Most markets are duopolies that have two providers using the same infrastructure.”

U.S. Internet connections generally are slower and more expensive than those in other developed countries.

Read the proposed National Broadband Plan (PDF)

Speaking at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, Derek Turner, the research director for the nonprofit group Free Press, said the broadband plan does not do enough to reduce the cost of high-speed Internet connections, which he said is the biggest barrier to adoption.

Still, he said, he is hopeful that the federal government can address the issue.

“I’m actually very hopeful for some positive outcomes,” he said at the conference, “because I’ve seen stranger things happen in Washington.”

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has framed the broadband plan as a boost for the economy.

“The National Broadband Plan is a 21st century roadmap to spur economic growth and investment, create jobs, educate our children, protect our citizens, and engage in our democracy,” he said in a news release.

“It’s an action plan, and action is necessary to meet the challenges of global competitiveness and harness the power of broadband to help address so many vital national issues.”

The plan also has the potential to anger broadcasters, which could be forced to give up spectrum that’s now used for TV but could be used for mobile Internet access.

“We were pleased by initial indications from FCC members that any spectrum reallocation would be voluntary, and were therefore prepared to move forward in a constructive fashion on that basis,” Dennis Wharton, of the National Association of Broadcasters, said in a news release.

“However, we are concerned by reports today that suggest many aspects of the plan may in fact not be as voluntary as originally promised.”

Ubisoft’s Assassins Creed 2.

(Credit: Gamespot/CNET)

Gamers have long known that patience is rewarded with cheaper, less-buggy games. But does that adage hold true for the inclusion of digital rights management as well? Not always, but history does show us that time makes even the strictest of DRM less sucky.

This could become especially important given the latest round of DRM implemented by both Ubisoft and EA, a system that requires players to have a constant connection to the Internet in order to play. Otherwise, they’re simply kicked out to the main menu until a connection can be had again.

Needless to say, this new requirement has caused the ire of the PC gaming community, especially those who play games on a computer that may not always have an Internet connection, such as a laptop.

So far, Ubisoft’s solution, dubbed the “Online Services Platform” can be found in two of Ubisoft’s titles, Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin’s Creed 2. The system has already seen its first setback, a pair of opening weekend denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Ubisoft’s servers that left European players of Assassins Creed 2 unable to use either piece of software for approximately six and a half hours.

As a response to the outages, Ubisoft released a patch last week that would allow players to start playing at the precise time where the connection failure had occurred. Previously, it would hop them back to a checkpoint, which was certainly better than nothing but could become frustrating on missions that went several minutes between checkpoints.

As for EA, the first title to take advantage of a similar service is Command and Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight, which is being released Tuesday. EA insists C&C4 has no real DRM, though it does use a serial key that can only be used for one online account. The player then needs to be online at all times they want to actually play the game.
The PC DRM connection

New, physical format PC titles almost always come with DRM. Despite the price, which is usually $10 cheaper than it is on consoles, the PC versions of any cross-platform game are the most pirated. The simple reason for this is that PCs offer a playground for potential pirates. Executable files can be fiddled with, as can incoming and outgoing traffic.

Publishers on the PC can fight back with third-party DRM solutions, as well as a first-party one from Microsoft that’s both hardware and software based. The company’s Games for Windows Live platform employs several types of copy protection, many of which exist on Microsoft’s servers and therefore cannot be hacked or modified as easily.

Like Ubisoft, Microsoft also offers a constant-connection type of DRM on any title, though it can also do “check-ins” on a more sporadic basis. These checks goes hand-in-hand with a user’s Windows Live ID, which means that anyone who wishes to play that game must share their information with Microsoft.

These efforts originate from the general success of gaming consoles. Console makers like Sony and Microsoft have been able to create closed boxes with complicated system checks and operating systems that run a security layer to keep unsigned code from running. Sure there’s a percentage of consoles that have been modified to run unsigned or otherwise modified game code–OK, actually it’s in the millions, but it’s nowhere near that of the PC.
The DRM waiting game

Spore, by Electronic Arts was heavily pirated. It had its DRM both cracked, and scaled back after two class action lawsuits.

(Credit: Gamespot/CNET)

Increasingly so, the joke seems to be on the customers who end up buying this software when it first comes out. A simple look back at some controversial titles has shown us that after the initial sales come, the publisher later removes the vast majority of the DRM, leaving gamers to enjoy the software with fewer restrictions.

Spore by EA may be one of the most high profile examples of this practice. It shipped in late-2008 with SecuROM, a copy-protection technology that keeps people from installing the game on too many machines. At the time of launch, that number was limited to three, meaning a user who had purchased the software would have to keep track of where that software was installed and deactivate any old copies before installing it on new hardware. The move to include this, along with a check that would verify whether a copy was legitimate each time a user went online, resulted in plenty of negative press, bad user reviews, and piracy on an absolutely massive scale after hackers were able to bypass the security measures.

After two class action lawsuits, which took aim at the company for failing to tell customers that the game installer would also install SecuROM, Spore publisher EA relented, cranking the number of installs up to five machines. Just two months after its launch, EA also released a version that did not have SecuROM at all, though it was sold through Valve’s Steam software, which has copy protection checks of its own (though they do not require a separate program, or limit installations–two of SecuRom’s follies).

SecuROM efforts on other games were met with similar results, including EA’s Mass Effect for PC, which used a five-machine limit. It too went DRM-free when it was offered on Steam in March 2009, a whole 10 months after its initial PC release.

The Witcher for PC supplied users with a patch after its release that let gamers run it without any digital rights protection.

(Credit: CD Projekt Red Studio/CNET)

BioShock from 2K Games also used SecuROM, though unlike Spore and Mass Effect, it limited players to just two installs. This was later pushed to five after 2K got into trouble for printing only a U.S. activation hotline number in its manual, which meant that people outside the U.S. had to make an international call to activate their copy. There was also a problem with the uninstaller not deactivating that particular user’s software activation slot, which led to the company putting out a deactivate tool. Eventually, when Bioshock had dropped into the bargain bin, 2K released an update that ditched the activation limit entirely.

Other publishers have been far more lenient with DRM pullbacks, though this tends to happen more with legacy software, or nonfranchise titles. Take for example The Witcher by CD Projekt Red Studio. Like many PC games, it required users to have the game disc in the drive at all times, though a year and a half after it’s release, the developer put out a patch that removed the need for that, as well as adding new game features.

Even Ubisoft, the purveyors of the aforementioned Online Services Platform, have scaled back DRM on legacy titles. This happened with 2009 title Dawn of Discovery, which used Tages, a DRM solution that keeps users from making a copy of the game disc. Ubisoft released a patch for the game that removed that protection, along with the need to activate the game online. It did the same thing last year for its World in Conflict title, developed by Massive Entertainment.

Similar efforts have been made by developer and publisher Activision, which back in January announced that it would be offering DRM-free versions of its “classic” titles on gaming site Good Old Games.
Is it worth the wait?

PC gamers, and gamers in general, are a restless bunch. Getting them to wait for anything is a hard sell, especially when it’s access to a new game. Pre-release copies of games showing up on file-sharing networks is now a common occurrence and one of the top reasons these more stringent DRM solutions are being put into place. So can you really blame a publisher for putting one of these systems in place in return for higher potential sales?

The one solution, as it is with most businesses, is to vote with your wallet and make it a point to the publisher or developer of a game that such systems are keeping your from purchasing a title, or greatly reducing your enjoyment of the game experience. That much is happening with Assassin’s Creed 2 on Ubisoft’s forums. Your other option, as mentioned before, is to be patient and wait for a version of the game that’s been stripped of some of its most biting DRM traits.

Still, this isn’t a good long-term solution. Early sales are often one of the big quantifiers in whether a studio will start working on a sequel, and if everyone were to wait to buy games once they hit the bargain price, publishers would simply stop making PC versions. There’s also no promise that the really heavy bits of DRM will be stripped out at a later date, except for the fact that most publishers are unlikely to want to maintain the cost of running the activation, and/or online verification servers for older software.

So will Assassins Creed 2, Silent Hunter 5 and Command and Conquer 4 go down in history as the first games to get away with always-online DRM? Or will they just be another, in a growing list of titles that have had to scale back on the protection after enough time and/or user outcry? We’ll find out soon.

For those who doubted that Microsoft was serious in its effort to re-engage with the Web, it’s time to put the skepticism aside.

At its Mix conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Microsoft gave programmers, Web developers, and the world at large a taste of things to come with its Web browser. Specifically, Microsoft released what it’s calling the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, a prototype that’s designed to show off the company’s effort to improve how the browser deals with the Web as it exists today and, just as important, to add support for new Web technologies that are coming right now.

The new software is only a framework, raw enough that it’s still missing a “back” button. But with “a few” updated preview versions set to arrive at eight-week intervals, the project will develop into a beta, a release candidate, and eventually the full-fledged product IE9, said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer and the executive who’ll describe the project at Mix.

Coming in the new version is support for new Web standards including plug-in-free video; better performance with graphics, text, and JavaSript by taking advantage of modern computing hardware; and a new effort at gathering and responding to feedback from those using the prototype software, Hachamovitch said.

Dean Hachamovitch, IE general manager

IE9 is months from release, but already it holds the potential to alter the browser market. Not only could it reinvigorate competition with a host of new rivals, it could help usher in the cloud computing era that some of those rivals are eager to embrace. In that era, the Web transforms from a foundation for static documents and Web sites into a foundation for interactive programs.

IE6, released in 2001 when Microsoft had won the browser wars of the 1990s, still is widely used today. It’s loathed among Web developers who want to use more modern Web technologies, and despite the release of IE8 a year ago, Microsoft is still saddled with a reputation as a company behind the browser curve. Mozilla’s Firefox now accounts for nearly a quarter of usage, Google’s Chrome has burst onto the scene and now is in third place, while Internet Explorer continues to gradually lose its share of usage.

With IE9, though, Microsoft is trying to rebuild the browser for the Web that’s to come through new standards such as HTML5 and CSS3, updates to Hypertext Markup Language for describing Web pages and Cascading Style Sheets for formatting.

The software caught the attention of Microsoft’s biggest browser rival. “IE9 looks great, very glad to see it. Congrats to the IE team!” said Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at Firefox backer Mozilla, in a tweet.

New Web standards”We saw that HTML5 will enable a new class of applications. Those applications are going to stress the browser runtime in ways today’s Web sites don’t,” Hachamovitch said in an interview. “We realized very quickly that doing HTML5 right was much more about designing all our browser subsystems around what the new apps will need than it was about a particular feature checklist. It’s understanding where the apps are going to go and building the platform that will get them there.”

With IE8, Microsoft put a priority on complying with existing standards, a dramatic turnaround from an earlier attitude that resentful Web developers saw as “Standard? IE is the standard.” With IE9 Microsoft is moving its standards religion into the future.

The company signaled its heightened interest in Web standards through new engagement in developing HTML5 and SVG, the Scalable Vector Graphics standard that the company shunned for years despite its possibilities for better rendering of graphics such as logos. IE9, those standards arriving as an actual product.

IE9 has “HTML5 through and through,” Hachamovitch said, as well as support for CSS3 and for showing SVG 1.1 imagery inline. Hachamovitch’s demo shows H.264-encoded HTML5 video, and he said that graphics such as maps are vastly more sophisticated with SVG support.

When Microsoft showed IE9 technology in November, it didn’t shy away from IE’s poor showing on the Acid3 test of compliance with various standards and technologies. IE8 scores 20 out of 100, the November IE technology reached 32, but the IE9 Platform Preview makes it up to 55. Microsoft also dings the test as imperfect, adding in a blog post, “A key part of our approach to Web standards is the development of an industry standard test suite. Today, Microsoft has submitted over 100 additional tests of HTML5, CSS3, DOM [Document Object Model, the structure of a Web page], and SVG, to the W3C,” the World Wide Web Consortium that oversees HTML and various other Web standards.

New JavaScript EngineAnother headline element for IE9 is a new JavaScript engine. When it comes to these engines for running Web-based programs, Chrome has V8, Opera 10.5 has Futhark, Safari has Nitro, and Firefox has the new JaegerMonkey.

Now Internet Explorer has its own new name for a JavaScript Engine: Chakra. On Microsoft’s test on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, IE9 Platform Preview is a tad faster than Firefox (using the older TraceMonkey engine) and a tad slower than Safari, Chrome, and Opera.

IE9 is competitive with rivals on the SunSpider JavaScript speed test.

(Credit: Microsoft)
The finer points of exactly where IE shows up in the rankings are less important than the comparison to IE8 and earlier versions, which by comparison crawl through JavaScript.

One big change in the JavaScript engine that Hachamovitch is proud of is its multicore support. As soon as a Web page is loaded, Chakra assigns a processing core to the task of compiling JavaScript in the background into fast code written in the native language of the computer’s processor.

Hachamovitch distinguishes this from the just-in-time compilation approach of other browsers, which he criticizes as a difficult balance of optimizing code well without slowing down the arrival of Web pages.

There are other efforts to make JavaScript a richer programming foundation, including the Web Workers standard to let JavaScript perform background processing tasks. Microsoft, though, wants to improve the Web as much as possible without requiring new programming approaches.

With the Chakra approach, “developers don’t have to change their markup. The Web page didn’t have to change. Essentially, dual- and quad-core machines get put to good use,” Hachamovitch said.

Microsoft already showed off IE9’s use of Direct2D and DirectWrite, interfaces in Windows Vista and Windows 7 that can accelerate graphics and text. At Mix, Hachamovitch’s demonstration shows the technology works to speed up SVG graphics as well.
Feedback time
The IE9 Platform Preview itself is a change, too. Previously, Microsoft delivered a more finished product to the world. Now it’s trying to get feedback at an earlier stage of development. And it’s explicitly seeking comment on a wide range of elements:

“The main technologies to call out here broadly are HTML5, CSS3, DOM, and SVG,” Hachamovitch said in a blog post. “The IE9 test drive site has more specifics and samples. At this time, we’re looking for developer feedback on our implementation of HTML5’s parsing rules, Selection APIs, XHTML support, and inline SVG. Within CSS3, we’re looking for developer feedback on IE9’s support for Selectors, Namespaces, Colors, Values, Backgrounds and Borders, and Fonts. Within DOM, we’re looking for developer feedback on IE9’s support for Core, Events, Style, and Range.”

Alphabet soup, to be sure. But when it comes to building a modern Web, those letters all reflect important standards. Microsoft’s embrace is all the more significant given that, with its Windows and Office businesses, has the most to lose from the migration of applications from the PC to the cloud.

China on Tuesday again warned Google not to stop filtering its web search engine results, as speculation mounted about the company’s plans following its threat to leave over censorship and cyberattacks.

The US Internet giant has said it could abandon its Chinese-language search engine and possibly pull out of China altogether after the hack attacks. It also says it no longer wants to bow to the Chinese government’s web censors.

“We have all along maintained a policy of opening-up and welcome foreign investments in China. But the prerequisite is they should respect and abide by Chinese laws,” commerce ministry spokesman Yao Jian told reporters.

“We hope Google will abide by the law, no matter whether it continues to do business in China or makes other choices.”

Yao said if Google were to decide to shut down its businesses registered in Beijing, it would have to notify the commerce ministry — and so far, no such notice had been received.

The spokesman also said Beijing was “opposed to politicising business issues” — an apparent jibe at the US government and lawmakers who have spoken out on behalf of Google and against Internet censorship in China.

Beijing tightly controls online content in a vast system dubbed the “Great Firewall of China”, removing information it deems harmful — including pornography and violence, but also politically sensitive material.

Google threatened in January to abandon google.cn and perhaps leave China altogether over what it said were cyberattacks aimed at its source code and at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

The company has since continued to filter results on google.cn, but says it will not do so forever.

“Google is firm in its decision that it will stop censoring our search results for China,” Google vice president and deputy general counsel Nicole Wong told the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee last week.

“If the option is that we’ll shutter our .cn operation and leave the country, we are prepared to do that.”

China’s minister of industry and information technology, Li Yizhong, warned Google last week that it would face “consequences” if it were to violate Chinese law by ending its filters, saying such a move would be “irresponsible”.

The Financial Times reported at the weekend that Google was “99.9 percent” certain to move forward with plans to abandon google.cn, citing an unnamed source.

But Google China spokeswoman Marsha Wang said Tuesday that, for now, no changes had been made.

“Google has not stopped censorship. This is a rumour. We do not have any update to share,” she told AFP.

(CNN) — Cresting the brow of autovia A-49 in Andalusia, 10 miles outside of Seville, the world’s first commercial solar “power tower” appears on the skyline like a giant obelisk.

Even on an overcast morning the sun’s rays are so intense they illuminate the water vapor and dust hanging in the air to create a giant lattice of white lines that appear to emanate from the eye of the tower.

The tower itself is 115 meters high — the height of a 14-storey building — and, bathed in intense white light, the overall effect resembles nothing so much as a religious object.

Valerio Fernandez is director of operations for the PS10 platform and its neighbor, PS20. That means he is responsible for the 624 giant mirrors — or heliostats — that reflect the sun’s rays into a receiver located at the top of the tower.

Each heliostat measures 120 square meters, which gives the entire heliostat field an area of 75,000 square meters. On a sunny day this can produce up to 11 megawatts of energy, enough to power a town of 6,000 homes, such as the neighboring community of Sanlucar la Mayor.

But Fernandez isn’t satisfied. “Our goal is to operate more than 300 megawatts for the year 2013,” he told CNN. “So in a few years we will be constructing and putting into service new and larger plants in order to provide huge amounts of solar renewable energy to this area of Spain.”

As Valerio explains the concept (“We just reflect light into the receiver, which is basically a boiler where we generate steam, and then we drive this steam through a turbine in order to move a generator and generate electricity,”) we are aware of the faint whirring of 600-odd motors that allow the heliostats to track the sun on two axes and concentrate this radiation on the tower.

The effect is incongruously life-like; hundreds of enormous mirrors all turning themselves towards the sun like a field of giant metal sunflowers.

We decide to get a better view. Putting aside fears that we will be fried like ants under a magnifying glass, we ascend the tower. From here the vista is even more spectacular: a glittering blanket of more than 600 mirrors winks up at us from the sun-scorched earth.

Here is also where the receiver is located. Composed of four, vertical 5.5 meter by 12 meter panels, arranged in a semi-cylindrical configuration inside a cavity with an opening of 11 meters by 11meters, the receiver is designed to deliver 55 thermal megawatts of saturated steam at temperatures of 257 Celsius. More than 92 percent of the sunlight reflected at the tower is converted into steam.

To the west lies an even larger tower surrounded by more mirrors. Although currently closed for maintenance, when PS20 is fully online again in April it will be the world’s most powerful solar power tower.

With a power capacity of 20 megawatts, double that of PS10, PS20 should produce enough clean energy to supply 10,000 homes.

Valerio is understandably optimistic. “We want to get as much of our energy from solar power as we can because it’s renewable, it’s clean and its contribution to combating climate change is very important,” he said.

“That’s why we are working to develop this technology as much as possible so it can have a large role in the future.”

M.C. Frontalot’s “Nerdcore Rising” drops classic geek references ranging from Dr. Who to the Atari 2600.

 

(CNN) — Geeks rock.

When Buddy Holly jerked onstage as a bespectacled counterpoint to the pelvis-swiveling cool of Elvis, it carved out a spot in rock and pop music for the kids more inclined to admire Stephen Hawking than Steven Tyler or Bill Gates than Billy Idol.

The South by Southwest Interactive conference kicks off Friday in Austin, Texas, offering up as pure a convergence of geek and rock sensibilities as you’re apt to find.

Started in 1987 to showcase Austin’s burgeoning alt-rock scene, South by Southwest added interactive and film gatherings in 1994.

Now, more than 17,000 people attend those two events, and South by Southwest is becoming as well-known for launching digital game-changers like Twitter as for musical acts like Beck.

All that is as good an excuse as any to round up our list of the top 10 geek anthems of all time.

From love songs about writing HTML code to synth-fueled denunciations of the cool kids, these odes to geekery are as good as it gets.

Which tunes did we leave out? This list could easily have been a Top 20. Click the player on the left to hear samples of our 10 songs, then join the conversation in the Sound Off section and make your case.

Our choices:

1. “She Blinded Me With Science,” Thomas Dolby

One of the greatest one-hit wonders in a decade known for them, Dolby [a stage named cribbed from Dolby Laboratories] brought geek to the Top 40 in 1982.

To this day, the chorus’ one-word interjection — “Science!” — is a universally recognized exclamation whenever geeks gather.

Dolby also walks the walk. He has helped invent the RMF file format, written music for video games and, since 2001, has acted as the musical director for the tech-intensive TED conference.

Geek essentials: Science, social awkwardness, being hit with technology.

2. “Dare to Be Stupid,” Weird Al Yankovic

“White and Nerdy” or “All About the Pentiums” would also have been obvious choices here from an artist with probably as loyal a geek following as anyone.

But “Dare to be Stupid” was a mission statement at a time when Al was still ascending to supernerd status — spoofing the synth-pop of groups like Devo while goofing on advertising slogans, catch phrases and cliches.

The song would be used in the 1986 “Transformers” animated movie and, years later, be covered by geeky rapper M.C. Chris.

Geek essentials: Daring to be stupid

3. “Nerdcore Rising,” M.C. Frontalot

Every song in Frontalot’s catalogue — sung by the father of nerdcore hip-hop — would be comfortable on this list.

But this call to arms from his 2005 debut album summarizes the movement — the “kids with the spectacles” have as much right to bust rhymes as anyone. (Let’s be honest: They couldn’t do much worse than some previous rap-rock mashups if they tried. Yes, Linkin Park, I’m looking at you).

Frontalot will be playing three Austin shows during South by Southwest, with a new album, “Zero Day,” due out in April.

Geek essentials: Wearing glasses, computers (including the Atari 2600), Stephen Hawking, l33t speak, Dr. Who, Dr. Suess, every single other word of the song

4. “In the Garage,” Weezer

“I’ve got the Dungeon Master’s Guide./I’ve got my 12-sided die./I’ve got Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler, too./ Waiting there for me./Yes I do.”

Any geek of a certain age instantly knew front man Rivers Cuomo spoke their language after hearing that opening line.

Cuomo, a Harvard graduate who worked the Buddy Holly glasses for much of his career, struggled with the geek-rocker label before finally embracing it, going so far as to confide to Rolling Stone in 2001 that he still played Dungeons & Dragons and leaned toward half-elf fighter-thieves.

Geek essentials: Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, Kiss, social awkwardness

5. “Through Being Cool,” Devo

“Whip It” may have been their biggest hit.

But on “Through Being Cool,” Devo exposes the great geek secret — they’re not uncool because they can’t be cool. They’re uncool because they think being cool is lame.

Geek essentials: Science fiction, rejecting popular fashion, pretending to be space aliens

6. “Code Monkey,” Jonathan Coulton

Coulton embodies the term “famous-on-the-Internet,” an artist whose fan base almost exclusively found him online. Bowing to digital-age reality, Coulton lets fans donate money to him via his site because he knows they’re all savvy enough to illegally download his music if they want.

As protagonists go, a coder with a caffeine addiction and a crush on the receptionist is right there at the top of the list.

Geek essentials: Computers, writing code for a living, social awkwardness, Mountain Dew

7. “Particle Man,” They Might Be Giants

Brainy lyrics and accordions combine to make this one a classic. Appearing on Warner Bros. “Tiny Tunes” didn’t hurt either.

The song has cropped up subtly in the fantasy work of novelist Terry Pratchett, in the Marvel Comics “X-Factor” series and as the name of a prototype for the Electronic Arts video game “Spore.”

It also might join Weird Al as the nation’s leading cause of teen accordion playing.

Geek essentials: Particles, accordions

8. “Add It Up,” Violent Femmes

This has probably the fewest direct references to geek culture of any song on this list, but it was a stark departure from the hair metal and stylized pop of the early ’80s.

Spastic, jerky, profane and desperate, “Add It Up” gives voice to every boy at the high-school dance who could never get his back off the wall and ask a girl to dance.

“I was in my bedroom — that’s where I wrote it — feeling frustrated,” Femme Gordon Gano told Rolling Stone in 2005. “I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. It just happened to feel good lyrically … and it still does.”

Geek essentials: Social awkwardness, lots more social awkwardness

9. “One Week,” Barenaked Ladies

How this quirky 1998 rap/pop hybrid by a group of Canadians who namedrop Aquaman and Akira Kurosawa became a No. 1 hit is anyone’s guess.

But listeners obsessive enough to memorize all the lyrics — and you definitely had plenty of chances while this song was seemingly being played by every radio station in the world at all times — found themselves speeding through a virtual geek-culture encyclopedia.

Geek essentials: Comic books, “X-Files,” samurai movies, anime, being Canadian

10. “Weird Science,” Oingo Boingo

It’s every geeky teenage boy’s fantasy: using “magic and technology” [in the form of a Memotech MTX512 and its blazing 64k of RAM] to create a beautiful, hard-partying girlfriend who, as an added bonus, can turn your mean older brother into a giant, flatulent frog thing.

Lead singer Danny Elfman would seal the deal in the years to come, lending his soundtrack wizardry to such genre movie classics as “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Batman” and “Corpse Bride.”

Geek essentials: computers, being bullied in high school, exceedingly active fantasy lives

(CNN) — One year ago, the founders of Foursquare stepped onstage before a tech-savvy crowd in Austin, Texas, to announce their concept: a smartphone app that lets you tell friends where you are.

Now, as Foursquare’s entrepreneurs head back to the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival, they’ve hit a half-million users of their buzz-creating mashup of social networking and mobile games.

Foursquare has taken the lead in the festival’s “location-based wars” as other upstart applications attempt to leverage SXSWi buzz to match the New York-based company’s rapid growth and horn in on a burgeoning market.

“We left South by Southwest [in 2009] with 2,500 users and had nothing going on all summer,” Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley said. “It peaked and then dropped. Then we started getting a little press, and it just took off.”

Foursquare uses GPS positioning in its app, available for iPhone, BlackBerry and Android phones, which lets users check in when they visit a bar, restaurant or other location.

SXSW: Location, location, location

The concept is to let users meet up in the real world, share tips on local hangouts or just compete by trying to earn virtual badges for certain activities or become “mayor” of a spot by checking in there more than anyone else.

Despite its relative newness, Foursquare has been creating buzz, inking partnerships with Bravo TV and, according to various media reports, preparing to roll out others with dining guide Zagat, the History Channel, Warner Bros. (CNN’s sister company) and HBO.

Foursquare is the second crack at mobile-based networking for Crowley and his partners.

They created Dodgeball — basically a simpler version of Foursquare — in 2004. Google purchased that app in 2005 and then discontinued it last year after Crowley and co-founder Alex Rainert resigned from Google in 2007.

“It was like a do-over; we got to start over with the same kind of functionality but do all the stuff we’d wanted to do,” Crowley said.

“I’d come from a company that was working on games that overlap with the real world, and we decided to build some gaming elements into it — game mechanics to encourage people to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise.”

The New York-based app was previewed around the city before its official coming-out party last year at South by Southwest, where it captured the imagination of techies looking for each other at the festival’s panels, presentations and parties.

Today users can “check in” at more than 1.4 million official Foursquare locations, and the service has awarded more than 1 million badges. On March 5 Fourquare had its biggest day ever, with 275,000 checkins, according to a recent post on the site’s blog.

But while Foursquare has gained the most traction so far, it’s not the only player in the mobile game/networking world.

Austin-based Gowalla also rolled out at last year’s SXSWi, although some early glitches meant creators didn’t have a product they were completely happy with until fall.

Gowalla, like Foursquare, has spruced up its look and functions and will be vying for the hearts of SXSW-goers this week, with special event-driven offerings.

Others like Yelp, PlacePop and MyTown are also trying to find a place in the emerging field. Even social-networking giant Facebook has announced that it will be adding location-based updates.

But the question remains: How big is the potential for such apps? Although it’s growing among the tech crowd, usership is still a far cry from sites like Twitter, with more than 70 million users, or Facebook, which has more than 400 million registered accounts.

“I think it’ll be a while before it really reaches a mass audience,” said Vadim Lavrusik, a tech journalist, social-media consultant and graduate student at Columbia University.

“For us techies, we sometimes tend to exaggerate how quickly these things are going to grow because everybody in our circles is using it. But that doesn’t mean the general public is using it.”

Still, he said many of the criticisms he’s heard about Foursquare are eerily similar to the ones he heard from people saying Twitter would never take off.

“People say, ‘Why would people want to know where I’m at? Will my friends actually come and join me if they’re on it?’ ” he said. “I say, ‘If they’re on it, yeah, they will.’ “

For Foursquare, the growing attention has prompted some backlash.

A Web site called Please Rob Me has exposed what its creators called security concerns when Foursquare users post their mobile location on sites like Twitter, alerting potential burglars that their homes are unoccupied.

Crowley pointed out that users may set their privacy settings so posts go to Twitter or Facebook or both, or only to Foursquare friends whom they have approved.

“People understand these things,” he said. “They generally know who they’re sharing with.”

One thing that won’t change with the growing popularity of Foursquare, Crowley sad, is the service’s occasionally snarky attitude.

Adopted first by a hip New York crowd, the game’s reward badges sometimes have a slangy, pop-culture flavor with titles like “Player Please!” (for male users who check in at locations with several women). There’s even one called “Douchebag,” reportedly given to people who check in often at places that other users have tagged as less than desirable.

“We don’t want to tone it down,” said Crowley, who believes that Foursquare may eventually let users choose which of the badges they see. “We’re not going to remove the Douchebag badge, but we might hide it … have a different set of badges for parents, college kids, etc.”