Google released their location tracking service Latitude last week to a mixed reception. If you’ve been living in a cave and missed the launch, Latitude is an application that sits on your phone (Android, Windows mobile, Nokia and Blackberry, iPhone coming soon) and tells Google where you are. Google then publishes your location on Google maps so all your friends can track you.

To see the location of other people you either need to run the mobile maps application or use an iGoogle widget. (hint – before you install it on your phone, first uninstall any previous version of maps and power-cycle the phone otherwise the “locate” menu might not appear)

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I resisted the urge to get SkyHD when it came out. The original thought was “When my sky+ dies, I’ll replace it with HD”. I didn’t figure on the original Sky+ box being built like a tank and still going after 5 or so years of fairly heavy use.

Looks like they might have finally persuaded me though – the current deal drops the price of the HD box to £49, which is about as cheap as I can see it getting without them giving it away.

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Word hit the net last week that Microsoft were cutting 1400 jobs over the next 18 months but the brunt of the casualties so far seem to be in the entertainment division. It looks like most of the Aces team responsible for the long running Flight Simulator series of games have lost their jobs, leading to speculation that there will be no further developments in this area. 

Microsoft Flight Simulator has been part of the computing landscape for nearly as long as PCs have been around – amazingly the series started in 1978 although the first Microsoft branded version came out in 1982. In the 25 years since that first version arrived it’s seen a dedicated following spring up, together with a host of hardware and software addons.

Luckily for flight sim buffs X-plane (Flight Sim’s main competitor) still looks strong and it wouldn’t surprise me if a number of current add-on vendors started looking that way for potential converts.

Via [Gamasutra]