There's plenty of interest in Microsoft's new Surface tablets and Windows 8 so it's a little surprising that the company is making a lucrative offer to get people to line up at stores on their big launch day.

The company is offering a $100 credit toward a full year of Xbox Music Pass to the first 100 people lined up at Microsoft stores when they open Friday morning. To receive the gift they also have to make a purchase.

Launch-day lines that turn initial sales into marketing events have become a phenomenon with big consumer brands ranging from Krispy Kreme stores to Apple devices. Some guy in New York is already lined up for Nintendo's Wii U, which goes on sale Nov. 18.

Microsoft must want to be sure there are enough people at its stores Friday to generate some buzz.

Xbox Music Pass is the unlimited streaming service that debuted this week on the Xbox and Windows 8. It provides "all you can eat" consumption of a catalog with around 18 million tracks in the U.S. and 30 million globally.

Similar streaming services are offered by Rhapsody, Spotify and other companies. Bloomberg today is reporting that Apple may launch a version with ads, more akin to online radio service Pandora, next year.

Here's the Microsoft offer:

To whet your appetite for tonight's unveiling of the new Seattle police drone, here's a video demonstrating a paramilitary drone called "Charlene" that's used for urban reconnaissance and other duties.

The video is actually a promo for the game "Call of Duty: Black Ops 2," but it shows how effective a drone could be for remotely enforcing the proper usage of Seattle sharrows and bike boxes. With drones on patrol, punks in bandannas will surely think twice before trashing a Starbucks in this town.

There is some salty language in the video, similar to what civil libertarians are muttering at the prospect of Seattle's finest filming people with an "unmanned aerial vehicle."

It looks like the future's going to be fun!

A boost from the Legislature -- plus grants from the likes of Amazon.com -- is increasing the size the University of Washington's computer science program by 25 percent this year.

That includes an increase of undergraduates being accepted to the program from about 160 a year to 200 a year, according to Hank Levy, chairman of the Computer Science and Engineering Department.

Levy and other faculty provided the update during the school's annual Industrial Affiliates meeting with tech companies and investors who support the program and recruit its graduates.

The school also has successfullyh recruited top-tier faculty, including world experts in machine learning, and more hires are in the works.

"We've had really the most remarkable year in our history," Levy said. "Not only did we hire a lot of people, we hired phenomenal people."

The state shifted nearly $8 million to boost engineering programs at the UW and Washington State University this year, providing $3.8 million for each school.

Levy said the UW computer science program requested $1.8 million of that funding and received $1.6 million. It's hoping to receive an additional $1 million in funds that will come from having so many additional students in the program.

In addition to boosting undergraduate enrollment, the department is adding 50 new Ph.D. students -- twice as many as last year, he said. Also doubling is the number of students in the fifth year master's program, which is growing from 10 to 20 students per year.

The event included recruiting sessions and research presentations in areas such as wireless power, human-computer interaction and privacy.

A lunchtime lecture was given by Carlos Guestrin, a machine-learning professor that the UW lured from Carnegie Mellon University with a $1 million endowment from Amazon.com.

Guestrin provided an overview of the GraphLab distributed computation framework that's being used to explore the capability of smaller computing systems to analyze enormous datasets.

One of the most dramatic examples Guestrin offered of its efficiency is a related project called GraphChi, which can use a Mac Mini PC to tally billions of Twitter relationships, doing in 18 seconds what previously took hours of work by a cluster of hundreds of computers.

Sorry Seattle.

For the big Windows launches in its "epic year," Microsoft chose to hold its gala launch events with the cool kids in New York and San Francisco.

Windows 8 launch events begin Thursday in New York, while Windows Phone 8 emerges Monday in San Francisco. Thursday's launch keynote will be webcast here starting at 8:15 a.m.

As a sort of consolation prize, the birthplace of Windows will get a brief light show on Thursday night. A Microsoft press release today said lights the color of its Windows 8 logo will illuminate the Seattle Great Wheel ferris wheel on the waterfront from 6:30 to 10 p.m.

(A spokesman noted that Microsoft's also going to have its BUILD conference in the Seattle area this year, bringing 2,500 developers to Redmond next week.)

Struggling social games giant Zynga is announcing sweeping layoffs and studio closures but it appears the company's engineering office in Seattle was largely spared.

Word of the layoffs surfaced earlier and was confirmed in an internal memo to employees from founder Mark Pincus.

The memo said the company is cutting 5 percent of its full-time workers and closing its studio in Boston. That would be around 160 of its roughly 3,200 positions.

Also proposed is the closure of studios in Japan and the United Kingdom.

The company is phasing out 13 older games and cutting back investment in The Ville, leading to layoffs at its Austin, Texas, studio.

Zynga's Seattle office is relatively safe because it's working on new game genres such as arcade titles, not the older franchises that are being trimmed back.

Zynga opened the Seattle office in Pioneer Square last year and now has about 60 employees here. It was planning to expand the office, at least before the company lost some of its momentum. Facebook's earnings report confirmed the slide, disclosing that its revenue from Zynga were down 20 percent.

Here's the Pincus memo:

Team,

Mark

It won't play "Halo 4," but the new Vbox from Seattle-based Verdiem does give users advanced weapons to combat power hogs.

Verdiem makes software for managing information-technology energy usage.

Now it's also selling the Vbox, a product Verdiem calls the "first IT energy management appliance." It costs a bit more than an Xbox -- $5,000, plus software licenses.

The box runs Verdiem's Surveyor software, which is being upgraded to connect to systems for managing building operations.

In its release, Verdiem said the idea is to give facility and energy managers "visibility and control" of heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting and security systems plus IT devices "for comprehensive energy management to significantly reduce energy waste."

More than 700 companies, universities and government agencies use Surveyor to manage more than 2 million devices, according to Verdiem.

Perhaps they need to create a service called Vbox Live, for those customers to compete against each other and see who kills the most watts.

Investors apparently aren't keen on Apple's plans to charge $329 for the iPad Mini -- $130 more than the starting Kindle Fire.

They seemed warm to the sleek new iMacs and MacBook Pros and the refreshed version of the iPad, which led the company's press conference beginning at 1 p.m. Eastern today.

But take a look at what happened to Apple's stock when the mini iPad's price was revealed just after 2 p.m. Eastern, in these charts from Yahoo Finance:

About the same time, investors fired up on AMZN:

Apple is trying to spoil the party in Seattle, announcing new PCs and a mini iPad ahead of Microsoft's launch of Windows 8 on Friday and Amazon.com's launch of its 10-inch Kindle Fire next month.

WIth the PC industry gearing up for a major refresh around Windows 8, Apple hopes hoping to lure buyers with new models of its desktop and portable computers. But while Apple's new hardware is gorgeous, it's also very expensive, which will limit its chances of taking over the desktop and laptop PC market that's still dominated by Microsoft.

A new version of the desktop iMac unveiled today is 80 percent thinner than the current model. Apple also is offering it with a hybrid hard drive -- combining a spinning hard drive with flash storage -- similar to what Windows PCs have been using to boost performance.

(SAN JOSE, CA - OCTOBER 23: Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller announcing the new iMac during the event at the historic California Theater on October 23, 2012 in San Jose, California. Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

The base model iMac with an i5 processor, traditional hard drive and 21.5-inch display costs $1,299 and ships next month. The base 27-inch model is $1,799 and ships in December. They no longer have DVD drives. (Apple is livestreaming the event to users of iOS, and it's being blogged by Apple's selected group of reporters.)

Apple refreshed its MacBook Pro line by adding models with high resolutoin "Retina Display" technology. A 13-inch model with USB 3.0 ports, a Core i5 processor and 256 gigabytes of storage but no DVD drive starts at $1,699. A 15-inch model starts at $2,199.

The new version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro - the best-selling Mac - is 20 percent thinner (0.75 inches thick) and nearly a pound lighter, at 3.57 pounds.

Apple is aiming at Amazon.com with a new version of its iBooks store and reading app. Despite the hype of previous versions they failed to get much traction against Amazon's Kindle platform, which also runs on Apple devices.

Apple also is trying to deflect the new challenge of tablet computers running Microsoft's Windows RT software that will debut on Friday, including Surface models made by Microsoft.

Its biggest weapon here is an updated model of the iPad announced today -- its fourth-generation -- with the same exterior but a faster processor and wireless radios. It starts at $499 or $629 for a model that connects to wireless phone networks. The starting price of the previous-generation "iPad 2" remains at $399.

As widely expected, Apple also unveiled an entirely new, smaller iPad -- the iPad Mini with a 7.9-inch display -- that's a defensive move against the successful 7-inch Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus 7 tablet. It's about a fourth less heavy than the full-size iPad and has a slightly more squared-off design.

The iPad Mini is also less resolutionary than the bigger iPads, with less than HD 1024 by 768 resolution, but it still runs the same apps. Its case is 5.3 inches by 7.87 inches and 0.28 inches thick, and it weighs two-thirds of a pound.

Apple declined to compete on price, perhaps counting on its brand cachet and slightly bigger screen to lure buyers from competing pads in the space between smartphones and full-size tablets.

The iPad Mini will start at $329 -- which is $130 more than the starting Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7. The $329 model has 16 gigabytes of memory and Wi-Fi; a version that works on phone networks starts at $459. Wi-Fi versions ship starting Nov. 2.

Apple's late co-founder Steve Jobs famously dismissed 7-inch tablets, saying they were destined to fail, but he's no longer running the company.

(Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)