Acer today took the lid off of its first Android-based smartphone, the Liquid, formerly shown off as the "A1." In addition to being the top computer manufacturer's first Android smartphone, it's also the first Android phone based on the 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset.

It's not the first Snapdragon phone altogether -- that honor went to the Windows Mobile-based Toshiba TG01 earlier this year -- but the Liquid will become be the most powerful Android handset available. Sony Ericsson is rumored to also be working on a Snapdragon-based Android phone with a UI known as "Rachael," and HTC is reportedly working on the "Dragon," but neither company has officially debuted a product as Acer has today.

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Download Opera 10.1 Beta 1 for Windows from Fileforum now.

At a time when performance and speed are more important to browser users than ever before, and when Web apps users need the best platform available, suddenly it's Opera Software that is having the most difficult time delivering. While Opera 10's "Turbo Mode" is intended to leverage the company's pre-rendering capabilities originally designed for the Opera Mini mobile browser, none of that matters with respect to raw JavaScript performance; and these days, Web browsers are essentially JavaScript engines with some markup on the side.

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I have to laugh at the sudden, slew of Mac bloggers taking swings at Windows 7 and asserting that Macs will continue to sell well after Microsoft's newest OS ships. Feeling a little defensive are we, bros? Their reaction shows worry that the thing they profess against -- surging PC sales that swamp Macs -- may yet be reality.

Windows 7 is simply Microsoft's best operating system ever. Mac fanboys should worry and circle together in defensive posture. Collectively, they're making a last stand against the PC giant. Please, please, boisterous Mac defenders, stand in the front lines and receive the first blows. You deserve them.

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Last March, the European Commission voted to enact a continent-wide law compelling member countries to take bolder steps to enforce their own copyright infringement laws. One of the more controversial provisions of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) has been to allow rights holders to petition member states' governments to act on their behalf. That provision has emboldened some rights holders and associations to act as evidence gatherers; and in Sweden, their right to do so was put to the test.

A group representing five publishers of audiobooks in Sweden were judged to be entitled to the identity of a single file-sharer. In a June decision, a district court in Solna ordered ISP ePhone to turn over the name of the file-sharer. It refused, and was forced in September to pay a fine of 750,000 kronor (about $107,400), one-tenth of which was to go to the publishers.

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If the script that updates your DNS records for a zone leaves off the trailing period for each record, the DNS server can't properly attach the top-level domain name. That little tip is probably permanently etched onto the head of an administrator somewhere at Sweden's Internet Infrastructure Foundation. Late yesterday evening, that single omitted period caused Web sites with Sweden's .se TLD to be inaccessible for at least one hour, with some perhaps remaining inaccessible until the following evening before downstream routers refresh their caches.

A security bulletin issued by the Foundation this morning advises administrators noticing difficulties with accessing .se sites to use BIND 9.2.0's rndc flush command to clear memory of cached data prior to a reload. The firm issued a new zone file shortly after the incident, although it admitted it refrained from going through the usual security steps to clear the zone file since .se sites remained inaccessible. A new, fully cleared zone file has since been issued.

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If Snow Leopard, the latest version of the Mac operating system released late last August, were seriously plagued with bugs, writes a volunteer contributor to Apple's discussion forum, the company would be besieged with complaints. But that may very well be the problem, as evidenced by this screenshot from a Snow Leopard user who attempted to formally report his problem to Apple through his operating system, and was met with this message: "An error has occurred. Please report the error to Apple Inc. by emailing the error detail to devbugs@apple.com."

As the user reported on Apple's forum, "I'd laugh if I wasn't in an apoplectic rage."

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There are service outages, and then there are service outages. T-Mobile customers who carry the Sidekick smartphone are learning the hard way that there's a major difference between having no access to a service for a little while and losing every contact, calendar entry, and related shred of personal data they've got.

In the not too distant past, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have all experienced basic, quaintly simple service outages. Despite the headlines and general chaos associated with each incident, the bottom line impact was never all that onerous: When service returned, so did their users' data. For the most part, users were given an easy excuse to take a few hours off. And with the exception of Google's subscription services, most were free, so folks couldn't argue that they weren't getting their money's worth.

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Apparently not only are Sidekick users losing their personal data. Now, in a separate incident, Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) users are also finding their data fully wiped.

The bug was actually discovered within a week of Snow Leopard's launch back in August, when users found that logging out of their account, into a "guest" account, and then back into their personal account would completely erase the content from their home drive (Documents, Movies, Pictures, Music, Sites).

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The manufacturer of a Windows maintenance toolkit featured on our Fileforum told CNET's Ina Fried last week that it believes boot times for Windows 7 are typically slower than boot times for Windows Vista. Iolo Technologies told Fried that it gauged the amount of time required for the CPU to reach a "true idle state."

As many veteran Windows users already know, the operating system doesn't actually boot to an "idle state" -- it's not DOS. Since that time, Iolo has been characterizing the time it stops its stopwatch as the time that the CPU is "fully usable," which seems rather nebulous.

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With the on-again/off-again relationship between the US Federal Trade Commission and antitrust enforcement clearly coming on again with the rise of the Obama Administration -- and the appointment of former FTC Commissioner Christine Varney at DOJ Antitrust -- it may no longer be acceptable among technology company directors to leverage their status with one company to influence another. Genentech Chairman Arthur Levinson's involvement as a lead director with both Google and Apple had never raised eyebrows until this year, when newly appointed regulators sought to eliminate the perception of possible collusion between technology companies.

That perception might have been obvious with regard to Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO who left Apple's board of directors last August. But for the career genetic scientist and molecular biologist whose company produced neither MP3 players nor search engines, his involvement was at one time seen as a way of sharing his life experience with multiple companies that could become partners.

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Download Mandriva Linux 2010 RC2 from FileForum now.

The last development version of Mandriva Linux 2010 RC2 (32 and 64 bit free versions) went live on Saturday, and is now available for testing from our FileForum.

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That's probably not a hard question for many Sidekick users to answer, given recent events. If you're a Sidekick user, please offer your answer -- or your experience during the week-long data crisis -- in comments. I ask the same of everyone else. Answer in comments the question: Should you trust Microsoft with your data?

Every existing or potential Microsoft cloud computing customer should ask and answer that question following the Sidekick data loss fiasco. How could Microsoft potentially lose all Sidekick user data? What? There was no server backup? It's not like Microsoft is inexperienced hosting data. The company bought Hotmail over a decade ago. Windows Live is all about hosted data.

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What began last week as a service disruption for T-Mobile Sidekick users devolved into one of the worst calamities in mobile/cloud synchronization thus far. One week after announcing the prolonged disruption, T-Mobile, its Sidekick service provider Danger, and Danger parent company Microsoft alerted users that the disruption had become a complete failure, resulting in the loss of contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists, and photos which users had synced to the network.

The companies only said that the data loss was attributed to "a server failure at Microsoft/Danger," but there have been rumors that it was actually a joint failure of Microsoft and Hitachi when attempting to update the Danger Storage Area Network (SAN), which failed, and no backup had been performed.

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12:05 pm EDT October 11, 2009 · The president of a design firm that specializes in data center power efficiency, and that was working on a new design last year for the Auckland-based data center that failed Friday morning, told Betanews today that even if changes were being made to that data center, if both the original design and the changeover plan were implemented properly, the data center failure would not have happened.

"What seems strange about this incident is that they are blaming it on a generator failure during testing," stated California Data Center Design Group President Ron Hughes, whose organization was not responsible either for the data center's current design or the changeover. "If this failure did occur during testing, the question I would ask is why didn't the redundant generators assume the load or why didn't they just switch back to utility power."

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We found the TestCube geometry test, which was created to address a bug that a Mozilla developer had discovered in Firefox. After we were told there were several areas we hadn't discovered where Opera is clearly the faster browser, we found our readers to be correct on that count, at least with respect to DHTML graphics rendering. Here not only is Opera the clear leader, but Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 is right on the heels of Chrome 3.

One of the more unique test batteries we've uncovered evaluates each browser's performance with handling 10 different permutations of JavaScript libraries -- specifically, how each browser performs when selecting a CSS element mathematically. This is Safari's strong point, though even Opera outperforms Firefox in this class as well.

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