Download Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" beta from Fileforum now.

Canonical today released the public beta version of Ubuntu 9.04, signifying to those on the "every-six-months-give-or-take-a-week" Ubuntu update schedule that a new, stable OS will be available in just about one month (April 23 to be exact.)

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Internet video startup Myka may have had a brief rough spell before its Linux-driven set top BitTorrent box could become a reality, but the first products will soon be touching down in consumer living rooms.

The initial manufacturing run of Myka's 80 GB, 160 GB, and 500 GB high-definition set-top boxes will be completed on April 6. These boxes are equipped with a built-in BitTorrent client and support for most of the video and audio codecs applicable to the enjoyment of the peer-to-peer technology.

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Charter Communications, the United States' third largest cable company -- headed by Microsoft co-founder, owner of the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trailblazers, Paul Allen -- has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The company announced on February 12 that it would begin the "financial restructuring" processes pending agreements from committee members and debtors. Today, the restructuring officially began.

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Today, Apple officially announced that its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is scheduled this year for June 8-12 at the Moscone West convention center in San Francisco, California. The conference plays host to some big Apple announcements, generally one focused on operating systems, one about new software, and one about hardware or platform developments.

Last year, the big announcement was the iPhone 3G, but MobileMe was also premiered, and a look at OS 10.6, also known as "Snow Leopard," was given. At that time, the release date for the OS was simply "next year." A later timeline from Apple showed its release as "Q1 2009."

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Pre-production shots of the Tesla Motors Model S were leaked on Twitter this afternoon by Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, just over an hour before the electric car was expected to be unveiled in a live ceremony some are considering "Cupertinic" in nature due to its previously secretive and highly controlled nature.

While the shots were posted on a Flickr page, they were very soon made private and un-viewable to the general public, but not before dozens of bloggers got their grubby mitts on them first. While the external photos are promotional in nature, the photo of the inside -- with a large touch screen in the unfinished center console -- is from an undetermined stage of development.

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Click for screen shots of Opera Mobile 9.7

Today, Norwegian browser company Opera announced that Opera Mobile 9.7 will be premiering next week at CTIA Wireless. The cross-platform mobile browser will offer better standards support, and combine the Presto 2.2 rendering engine found in the Opera 10 desktop browser with a new server-side optimization technique the company calls Opera Turbo.

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Nintendo today has provided a solution for the Wii's painfully underdeveloped onboard storage by endowing the console with the ability to boot games directly off of SD cards.

Previously, any downloaded games could only be launched if they were installed on the Wii, but with the System's meager 512 MB flash memory, that only left space for a handful of titles. While this was manageable early on, when all that was available were Virtual Console emulator titles that didn't consume much space, the introduction of WiiWare titles made that small amount of storage seem even smaller.

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Sprint announced today that WiMAX will be coming to ten major markets this year: Atlanta, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Portland, Charlotte, and Fort Worth.

Unlike Baltimore, the only city with a complete Sprint WiMAX deployment, these will not fall under the Xohm moniker. Nor will they fall under the spun-off "Clear" brand, even though the deployments are going to be essentially the same.

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Maybe it was thanks to its surprisingly popular Super Bowl commercial featuring an alien Alec Baldwin, or maybe it's thanks to its clean interface and ever-growing library of content, but Hulu's popularity exploded last month.

According to comScore's Video Metrix service, Hulu became the fourth most-viewed video site on the Internet, bypassing Microsoft, Viacom, and AOL sites, and snaring a 2.5% share of the market. The NBC-News Corp. joint venture climbed two positions in the ranking and experienced a 42% increase in views in February. The majority of the growth (33%) took place after the Super Bowl advertisement began running.

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If you happen to be in one of the 130 US Cities with T-Mobile 3G coverage, you're in luck. The perennial last horse in the 3G race today unveiled its first 3G USB modem, called T-Mobile webConnect.

The device is made by Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei, which specializes in UMTS/HSPA products, and due to the current sparseness of T-Mobile's 3G network, webConnect carries a modicum of additional features to add value.

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After releasing the voice-activated search application in November for iPhone, and then last month for Android with its RC33 update, Google has brought the functionality to BlackBerry users.

The feature works either with the Google Mobile App, or by simply navigating to http://m.google.com, and holding down the "talk" button to administer vocal searches. The Google Mobile app is available on all versions of BlackBerry running on O/S 4.1+ and voice-enabled searches only on O/S 4.2 and above. Additionally, the updated site also supports "My Location," which uses the phone's location data to automatically narrow down searches to results within a close proximity to the user.

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TiVo announced this morning that it has inked a deal with Blockbuster to bring the company's streaming online rental service to broadband-connected Series2, Series3, TiVO HD, and HD XL set top boxes.

Blockbuster's OnDemand service will reside alongside Netflix on Demand, Amazon Video on Demand, CinemaNow and Jaman, undoubtedly making TiVo the strongest supporter of the streaming on demand model today.

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PC gaming is a lifestyle. It's not like console gaming, where a user can just plop down in front of his TV, turn on a game for a couple of hours, and walk away satisfied. Side effects include fanatical hardware consumption and relentless resource tweaking.

The newest and most cutting-edge games demand the most from a user's system, and this drives PC gamers to have, at the very least, knowledge of what's newest in graphics, processing, sound, and peripherals. Moreover, it causes much of PC gamerdom to fall in the "power user" category, or those who put heavy demands on their computers for long periods of time. It's been that way since the dawn of the Sound Blaster, and many after school jobs been taken to feed the need for more gear. Of course, the PC gamers I grew up with also had part-time careers as electronics store shoplifters, but that's another story.

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Download Zinc Beta 3 from Fileforum now.

Zinc is a video-centric browser formerly known as Zviewer, and designed for use on home theater PCs and Windows Media Center PCs. The software is similar to Boxee in purpose, letting users access online video content and their own stored media on their television.

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Sprint Nextel's iDEN network has a special place in job site communication. The network's push-to-talk feature is ideal for maintaining constant contact with multiple individuals in separate locations, and its familiar "chirp" is a sound heard echoing across construction sites throughout the country.

Today, Sprint has gone further into the field and announced its partnered with Ford Motor Company in its Ford Work Solutions in-dash PCs. The lineup of Ford F- and E-Series vehicles offering the computers will be available this spring, according to the company.

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