Computers-Plus

Zynga Chief Executive Mark Pincus wrote a letter to accompany the game maker’s IPO filing, which hit this afternoon. The letter — complete with bullet points that take the shape of Zynga’s bulldog logo — lays out Zynga’s philosophy of games. But this philosophy isn’t as fun as we would have hoped. For your pre-holiday weekend, we thought we’d substitute a few of our own thoughts in italics. (Note to editors and readers: This is a joke. You are on the Wall Street Journal’s tech blog. Do not panic.)

Dear potential shareholders,

Zynga is a company with more than 2,000 amazingly talented employees dedicated to crafting tiny virtual objets d’art such as special edition cows, cottages, groovy barns, and ponies (pink ponies, candy cane ponies, clown ponies, etc.) for anyone fanatic enough to buy them. And when we say fan

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You can beat your dual-screened Kyocera Echo Android phone against a metal table and it will not break, says a child scientist in this new ad.

As far as we can tell, Kyoceras dual-screened Echo Android phone isnt busting up the sales charts on Sprint. Knowing this, Kyocera has decided to shift its marketing strategy away from the crazy shifting dual screens and onto a more traditional sales tactic: its durability.

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A newly-discovered botnet is ‘practically indestructible’, security researchers say.

TDL-4 is the rootkit component of the TDSS malware, which has been around since 2008. But in the three months since it hit the scene, it’s sucked in more than four and a half million PCs around the world. About a third are based in the US.

And in this, its latest incarnation, it has the cheek to include its own version of an anti-virus capability, which scans slave machines for software that could enable it to be taken over by another botnet.

It can now delete around 20 of the world’s most prolific malware packages, including Gbot, ZeuS and Optima.

It has its own encryption method for communication between infected computers and the command and control servers, and can also use a public peer-to-peer network to sending commands to control infected computers.

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The launch of Llano last week means that its time to give our beloved System Builders Guides an update. With the focus of the new Fusion platform from AMD being aimed at building well priced systems it seemed the perfect opportunity for our $1000 USD Sub-lieutenant PC platform to get a major overhaul.    The base of the system revolves around the AMD A8-3850 2.9GHz Quad-Core APU and an ASUS F1A75-V Pro motherboard. Along with that weve moved to a HD 6670 video card which can run in CrossFire with the onboard GPU present in the A8-3850 APU. We also made the switch to the Flare series of memory from G.Skill which has been built for the AMD platform to help get the most performance out of it. < Read more…