Concept video from Mozilla Labs gets developers thinking, talking
A typical developer may often leave a major developers' conference thinking that most everything relating to how a graphical operating system works, has already been invented. But a new video from Mozilla Labs blows away that illusion.
A new set of conceptual videos produced by Mozilla Labs engineer and user experience chief Aza Raskin -- the son of the late, legendary Apple Macintosh and Xerox PARC user interface designer Jef Raskin -- offers some completely new ideas for how a Web browser, ostensibly a future version of Firefox for mobile, would work on touch-capable handsets.
Google, Yahoo make the deal: AdSense on Yahoo Search
Late Thursday afternoon, the news came from Google that it will indeed become a full-time provider of AdSense advertising for Yahoo's search pages, and the two companies' IM protocols will become interoperable.
Under the deal, as Google's announcement today describes it, Yahoo will become a carrier of AdSense-driven contextual ads not only within its own search pages, but also optionally for other services that it hosts. But Yahoo will continue to provide the search functionality -- it is not sublicensing Google's search to substitute for its own, or making any kind of a deal that passes control of Yahoo Search over to Google.
Opera releases version 9.5
In its plan to gain back usage share it has steadily been losing to Firefox in recent months, Opera this morning released version 9.5 of its Web browsers for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Microsoft has closed the door, says Yahoo
A statement issued by Yahoo this afternoon says that all talks with Microsoft over any possible combination of their businesses has effectively concluded, and that it wants to maintain its own search business.
One final meeting between both companies' executives apparently took place on Sunday. "At that meeting, Microsoft representatives stated unequivocally that Microsoft is not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of Yahoo, even at the price range it had previously suggested," the statement reads.
Doing the math: 3G iPhone not really cheaper in the long run
There's evidence of a lot of savvy business deals having taken place between AT&T and Apple, with both sides getting more of what they want from the new iPhone, while customers get the impression that they're getting a better deal too.
The big news from Monday was the dramatic drop in the up-front price for Apple's next-generation iPhone, made available in the US through AT&T. While that makes the barrier to entry somewhat easier for new buyers, and probably raises AT&T's gambling stakes for the new device, in the end, new two-year contract holders (the minimum allowable for the iPhone) will end up paying much the same, assuming they use 3G service.
Mozilla Firefox 3.0 to be released June 17
Late Wednesday evening, a Mozilla spokesperson confirmed to BetaNews that the day the final edition of Firefox 3.0 would be made available to the general public, will be this upcoming Tuesday, June 17.
The time the final edition goes live was not disclosed, although the organization said it will be converting its headquarters in Mountain View, California, into "Camp Firefox" where invited guests and employees will celebrate its efforts to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloaded piece of software in a 24-hour period. That celebration is set to begin in the early evening, Pacific time.
Expect crash recovery features in new IE8 builds
Late Wednesday, a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews that a TechEd session in Orlando today summarized some of Internet Explorer 8's key new features for administrators, one of them being crash recovery.
One much improved feature added to the earliest public betas of Mozilla Firefox 3.0 is its ability to remember and recall open pages on a forced exit or a crash -- a feature which was originally integrated into Firefox 2.0, but which frankly didn't work all that well. That version crashed more often, in our experience, and only sometimes recalled its previous state.
ZoneAlarm Pro misidentifies Yahoo Messenger as a Trojan...again
It's getting more difficult to keep track of the various stages and permutations of malware, whose definition has expanded to mean "anything you didn't ask for and don't want running." But since when did Yahoo IM become malware?
It's no secret that a lot of our Windows-based production systems, and even some of our virtual ones, run ZoneAlarm Pro. There are a lot of software-based firewalls available now, but for the most part, we've been able to trust ZoneAlarm, even now that its originators have been absorbed into Check Point Software Technologies.
Mozilla issues Firefox 3.0 RC3 bug fix for Mac
This morning, Mozilla's FTP servers were updated once again with a new round of release candidates for its next Web browser, but curiously, we noted RC3 for Windows was identical to RC2 for Windows.
So what is 'OpenCL,' Apple's next enhancement to Mac OS X 10.6?
On Monday, Apple made mention of a curious new technology it said would help accelerate the development of CPU-to-GPU process sharing, calling it OpenCL. But the lack of information about what it is makes us all the more curious.
In its press materials released Monday, Apple made mention of a technology it called OpenCL, whose purpose was reportedly to enable so-called GPGPU functionality -- the ability for graphics processors to handle some of the heavy computing tasks normally threaded to CPUs. Since Apple is already involved with a project that's part of Khronos Group's OpenGL, specifically to enable GPGPU functionality, our first reaction was that this must be a typo.
SQL Server 2008, at last, attains Release Candidate status
Although there have already been public betas of Microsoft's new relational database, most notably one launched last February, the latest release candidate lets you reliably test the development environment's most critical new feature.
Download Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Release Candidate 0 from FileForum now.
Microsoft will exit the classifieds business
Users of a classified ad service running on Windows Live, called Expo, began receiving on-screen notices last week that the service will cease to exist on July 31, and that no new applications for accounts are being taken.
As far back as November 2005, Microsoft had major plans to develop an online marketplace for individual advertisers, based around a regular -- if not particularly innovative -- API. The plan there was to create a new channel for the influx of users to Windows Live services, including Messenger, in light of the very sudden rise to popularity of services such as Craigslist -- services that newspaper chains believe are threatening their very existence, by usurping one of their principal revenue streams.
EC's Kroes advocates mandatory enforcement of open standards
Europe's legislator and administrator for competition suggested this morning that free enterprise alone -- letting markets decide standards -- may not be an effective means of ensuring interoperability, and that penalties should apply.
During a panel discussion this morning in Brussels, which included European legislators and minor heads of state, European Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes took a very hard line stance in favor of open standards in software, going so far as to propose the consideration of new legislation that would actually mandate their use by "dominant players" in order for their software to be sold in Europe.
DOE supercomputer broke the petaflop barrier, conference acknowledges
Though unofficial news leaked this morning, this afternoon, independent sources are acknowledging a new fact: A computer made with IBM Cell and AMD Opteron processors can process a thousand trillion operations per second.
This afternoon, the itinerary of the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden was officially altered to make way for a special panel, acknowledging what the US Department of Energy had announced a few hours earlier: Its Roadrunner supercomputer, built by IBM as a unique hybrid of Cell BE and AMD Opteron processors, has recorded an official throughput speed above one quadrillion floating point operations per second -- one petaflop.
WWDC keynote: Some notable no-shows
With the spotlight growing every time Apple puts on a major show, many feel it would be nice if the company would leave some real estate open for some Mac-related innovations. The keynote came and went, and the Mac was absent.
There was a time when Apple's World-Wide Developers' Conference spotlighted a little device that used to be all the rage, called the Macintosh. But for the entire two hours of CEO Steve Jobs' keynote speech at Moscone Center in San Francisco this morning, the attention was on the 3G iPhone and the iPhone SDK 2.0.
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