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homepage. We hope you enjoy your visit! |
| Want to suggest your own front page posting? Then click here to submit news! |
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 The Official Google Blog has confirmed that Google will release the first beta of its own web browser on Tuesday, September 2. The web browser, known as Google Chrome, will be open-source and is based on elements from WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. It will contain a new JavaScript engine which Google claims will be able to run web applications that aren't possible in existing web browsers.
 View: Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser
View: Google Chrome comic book (Yes, a comic book)
View: Google Chrome homepage (available Tuesday)
 News source: In-house |
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 We're excited to release IE8 Beta 2 today for public download. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please try it out!
You'll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.
While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2.
 Download: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
View: Full Blog Post
News source: IEBlog |
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 THERE ARE A ton of 'rumors' floating around about Nvidia giving up the ghost on its ailing chipset division. Nvidia is desperately trying to deny it, but don't believe the spin, the division is deader than an Nvidia mobile GPU.
Just over a week ago, Nvidia's maximum leader, Jen-Hsun Huang, held a meeting with Taiwanese mobo partners. He directly asked them if there was a reason why Nvidia should stay in the chipset business. You could hear the crickets chirp.
In mainland China. No one came up with a reason, so the division was officially killed, and the teams will be rolled into GPU projects.
Nvidia PR is having the proverbial hissy-fit, but ignore it, they do that a lot. The INQUIRER has talked to people who were at the meeting, and they confirmed the reports, and are dead convnced that Nvidia chipsets are a thing of the past.
This is not to say that there will be no new chipsets from today. Things currently done or almost done will be out, but new designs won't be started, and early-stage projects are not likely to continue. Deep breaths people, projects on the near term horizon are safe, or at least safe from that paticular axe.
View: Full Article
News source: The INQUIRER |
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 The most true and holy Apple religion has decided that Intel's Montevina shall be excommunicated from the next version of the MacBook.
According to Apple Insider, Cappuccino could be using a chipset from a different company - or even an internally developed one - in the next iteration of the MacBook, which should appear in the next six or eight weeks.
Apple Messiah, Steve Jobs, who has been taking time off from performing his incredible shrinking miracle, has decided that while Intel's mobile Centrino chipsets have been pleasing in his sight, the Montevina version has fallen from grace.
Apple sauces say he things that Chipzilla's attempts at integrated graphics chipsets on Montevina are not as good as they should be.
The question is, what would Jobs' Mob be considering worthy to stick under the bonnet of its latest box of joy.
Apple Insider thinks the fruit-themed toymaker might have hatched a deal with AMD or Via for the new chipsets.
View: Original Article
News source: The INQUIRER |
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 Earlier this week Microsoft posted details about their "new" operating system, codename "Mojave".
In reality, it's an experiment in which Microsoft disguised Windows Vista as codename "Mojave", so regular people who've never used Vista could see what it could and decide for themselves.
After they had seen this they were asked to give a rating out of 10. One lady, who had previously given Vista a 0 from just what she had heard, went on to give "Mojave" 10 out of 10. Clearly proving that what people hear about Vista isn't true.
Many of the group who were talked to decided that they would now go out and upgrade to Vista, so that shows Vista isn’t as bad as everyone says. Just everyone has the wrong perception.
View: The "Mojave" Experiment
View: Original Article
News source: iWinUX |
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Developers of new engine say it offers a more comprehensive way to search the Internet.
Anna Patterson's last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.
She believes her latest invention is even more valuable - only this time it's not for sale.
Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.
The end result is Cuil, pronounced "cool." Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.
Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power and Louis Monier - searched for better ways to search.
View: Cuil Search Engine
View: Full Article
Source: CNN |
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 Microsoft has just released Power Pack 1 for their Windows Home Server software. Similar to a service pack for other versions of Windows, the Power Pack includes a number of bug fixes and improvements designed to enhance the overall experience the consumer has with the software. The highlighted changes listed are as follows:
- Support for home computers that are running Windows Vista x64 editions
- Backup of Home Server shared folders
- Improvements to remote access
- More efficient power consumption
- Improved performance
Additionally, Power Pack 1 also includes for the bug described in KB Article 946676 in which files could possibly become corrupted on a Windows Home Server computer that contains more than one hard drive.
If you have Windows Update set to "Automatic", Power Pack 1 will be downloaded automatically and installed for you. The setup file can also be manually downloaded from Microsoft's website.
Download: WHS Power Pack 1
View: Original Post
News source: Neowin.net |
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 Advanced Micro Devices CEO Hector Ruiz is stepping down from the helm of the troubled chip company, and Dirk Meyer is taking over.
Ruiz announced the leadership change Thursday during AMD's second-quarter financial earnings conference call. He will remain as executive chairman, but Meyer will immediately take over as the sole executive leader of AMD. "The time is right to turn the company over to a new leader."
Ruiz announced last year that Meyer was the designated successor to the CEO position, but he also said that he planned to stay on the job through 2008. Amid continued heavy losses, however, it seems the situation was too much for the company's board of directors to bear.
Ruiz praised Meyer as he introduced AMD's third-ever CEO.
"He is a talented business executive who is known to make decisions quickly and just as quickly turn those decisions into action. In short, he is the right leader at the right time for this company," Ruiz said, in announcing his own departure from the executive chair.
Ruiz replaced legendary founder Jerry Sanders as AMD's CEO in 2002, after joining the company in 2000 as president and chief operating officer from Motorola. His tenure was a whirlwind that saw AMD leap from an afterthought among the world's top PC companies to a top player in the chip business on the strength of its Opteron processor, only to slide underwater once again after botching the introduction of a quad-core processor.
Meyer's engineering talents are unquestioned within the chip industry, having presided over several very important processor designs during the last 20 years.
"Dirk is an experienced and prolific engineer with over 40 patents and many chip designs to his name including the ground-breaking DEC Alpha processor," Ruiz said. "He led the design of our industry-transforming AMD64 architecture--and then took the reins of what was then the Computation Products business--doubling its revenue, expanding its customer base, partner and R&D footprint, and changing the face of the microprocessor industry as we know it."
View: Full Article
News source: CNET News.com |
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 The iPhone's days of mobile web browsing superiority are numbered (if not over already). Today the first beta of the long-awaited Opera Mobile 9.5 has been released for Windows Mobile devices. I tested it out on my XV6700 and I can confirm that it is awesome. In fact, I am typing this news post with it right now!
If you have a Windows Mobile device, then you know what to do!
Download: Opera Mobile 9.51b1
News source: In-House |
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 On Wednesday, the Mozilla organization released a maintenance, 3.0.1 version of their Firefox web browser.
This new version fixes several issues found in Firefox 3--including security and stability issues.
View: Release Notes
Download: Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Windows, English (7.8 MB) | Other Systems & Languages
News source: Mozilla |
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 TrueCrypt 6.0 has been released.
This version introduces parallelized encryption and decryption on multi-core processors (or multi-processor systems). Increase in encryption/decryption speed is directly proportional to the number of cores and/or processors. For example, on a quad-core processor, encryption and decryption is four times faster than on a single-core processor with equivalent specifications.
This version also introduces the ability to create and run an encrypted hidden operating system whose existence is impossible to prove (provided that certain guidelines are followed), the ability to encrypt an entire system drive even if it contains extended partitions, a new volume format that increases reliability, performance and expandability, and more.
For a complete list of changes, see the version history.
View: TrueCrypt Version History
Download: TrueCrypt 6.0
News source: TrueCrypt |
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 Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was set Friday for his last day of full-time work at Microsoft - the company he founded 33 years ago on a hunch that personal computers would become an integral part of everyday life. The world's largest software company said that it was not planning any public events to observe the transition, though the change would be marked by internal events. Gates, 52, will continue to hold the title of non-executive chairman and work about one day a week at Microsoft.
View: Full Article
News source: Releaselog
I'm glad to hear he will devote his time to his charity work. |
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 Don't like .com? How about .thispagerocks?
ICANN, the organization that oversees internet addresses, will soon allow anyone to apply for his very own generic top-level domain (gTLD). In other words, you'll soon have the power to put almost anything at the end of your url, eschewing existing top-level domains such as ".com" or ".edu."
"This is a historic resolution," said ICANN chairman Peter Dungate Thrush, during a conference call with reporters, just after the organization's annual meeting in Paris. "You should see this as being as significant as Margaret Thatcher's decision to liberalize the telecoms market in the UK. This is a decision to fully liberalize the TLD space."
ICANN estimates it will begin taking applications in April or May of next year. The fee for each application will be "in the low six figures in American dollars," and the first customized gTLDs will likely arrive in the fourth quarter of 2009.
The organization has also agreed to "fast track" certain IDN ccTLDs - country code top-level domains that use non-Latin characters. You know: Russia's country code is currently "ru," but it wants the Cyrillic equivalent.
Sorting out non-Latin codes for every country on earth will take a good two years, but ICANN wants a quicker fix for countries like Russia and China. "The issue of how to express country codes in characters other than Roman characters is an exceptionally complicated one, technically and in terms of policy," Dungate Thrush said. "The internet has always relied on a table that outlines all two letter country codes, and that table is in English...It may take up to two years to develop a new table.
"In the meantime, there are clearly some countries, like Russia, who need internationalized country codes much sooner."
But this fast track is only so fast. ICANN still needs to approve an actual plan for the likes of Russia and China, and this will likely come at its next board meeting, which hits Cairo in November.
Plus, the organization has finally put an end to domain tasting. Existing ICANN rules allowed anyone to return any domain within five days without paying a penny. But this allowed net miscreants to repeatedly "test the marketability" of thousands upon thousands of addresses. That five-day grace period now applies to only 10 per cent of the domains an outfit registers in a given month.
View: Original Article
News source: The Register |
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 It appears that graphics cards have finally found a non-gaming marketing focus: Video.
Both ATI and Nvidia have been beating the drum of video transcoding for some time, promising a far better experience in transcoding your HD and SD videos into handheld formats such as Apple's iPod/iPhone or Sony's PSP. Of course, hardware acceleration does not work without software and both ATI/AMD and Nvidia are relatively weak in this area. It is one side to demonstrate a cool technology, but you really want to have an actually retail/e-tail friendly product to create a convincing story.
Luckily, CyberLink has caught up with GPU transcoding capabilities in summer of 2007 and started to work on adding transcoding to its own software stack. One year later, we are seeing result: The company’s PowerDirector 7 Ultra ships with GPU-accelerated video transcoding.
Shuichi Takagi, CyberLink's vice president of of business development ran a demonstration on a just launched ATI Radeon 4850 512 MB, proving that the hardware and software is capable of converting four HD MPEG-2 movies into MPEG-4 simultaneously - in real time. According to Shuichi, it will take about 30 minutes to process four full-length movies and compress them into handheld-friendly 200+ MB files.
CyberLink's PowerDirector 7 Ultra is available now for $120.
View: Original Article
News source: TG Daily |
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Today Microsoft has released the RTM version of Hyper-V. To upgrade to RTM, you need to apply KB950050 to the parent partition AND upgrade/install the RTM Integration Services in each virtual machine.