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Your first car is as special as your first love. Whether you purchased it after years of working after-school jobs, or it was a graduation gift from thrilled parents, that otherwise soulless piece of machinery takes on the characteristics of a beloved pet. You name it, we dress it up, you let it become an inextricable part of our personality, and you have trouble letting them go. Even after the thing has become a leaky, noisy, smelly hazard to the health and safety of everyone around it, you still hold onto it for long after it should have been retired.

As we endure the Next Great Recession and are forced to make our possessions last longer, I wonder if the same sort of attachment will apply to home video game consoles.

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The Cult of Mac's rumor maw out-talked Apple and has made the 3G S look even more like a lame incremental update than it actually is. Yes, it rocks a faster processor, faster data connection, improved camera, includes video recording and magnetometer, but the new product is disappointing. After all, prior to the keynote, Mac rumors included a new tablet, an "iPhone Nano," an iPhone on Verizon, a 64 GB iPod Touch, and of course, the return of ailing Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Expectations were high, and were left unfulfilled.

However, behind the smokescreen caused by the new device and its "battle" versus the Palm Pre, the only one year-old iPhone 3G with its new $99 price tag casts an ominous shadow over the entire handset business.

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Download Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta 99 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Already, Mozilla Firefox testers have already swallowed one unanticipated renumbering of the browser, so perhaps they'll be more acclimated to this development from last night: With two successive weekends of testing having been completed, and with kinks apparently remaining in what Mozilla wanted to call its Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate, the candidate for the Candidate was publicly released today anyway…just not as the RC.

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With what European telcos have been charging their customers for mobile movie downloads, they might have been able to fund the entire movie. Smartphone users in Ireland, for example, were being charged as much as €6.82 ($9.55 USD) per megabyte of bandwidth, when their phones roamed outside their service areas. Telcos had been blaming the high cost of interstate commerce for these extraordinary roaming rates.

But an agreement announced yesterday between the European Council of Ministers -- the coalition of telecom ministers of the EU's member states -- will effectively force those states to find a way around that problem. Starting Wednesday, July 1, telcos may only charge no more than €1 per megabyte (about $1.40 USD) for roaming download charges. In addition, SMS messaging charges across service boundaries (which usually means, across countries' borders) will be capped at €0.11, which is about one-third of what some Portuguese customers have been paying.

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Truly, Carol Bartz is the gift that keeps on giving to tech writers. During an interview on Fox Business News Monday, the Yahoo CEO uttered some tart criticism of Bing's momentary grab of the second-place StatCounter ranking last week ("They didn't beat us by much. It was one day."), an eyebrow-raising claim ("half the Internet users in the world use Yahoo"), and a smackdown concerning merger talk -- not the usual Microsoft chatter, but regarding AOL. More on the Unsinkable Carol Bartz later in What's Now, but first, what do you call a release candidate candidate?

Firefox's not-yet-release-candidate goes public

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Last Saturday, a group of hackers cited by Insecure.org claimed having pilfered "everything, their databases, confidential documents, scripts and programs from their servers, financial documents up to 2009," belonging to T-Mobile. If claims of a data breach are proven true, investigators should look to some of the machines brought into the company as part of previous deals with third-party providers to modernize the network.

They should also ask what part of "upgrade" the company doesn't understand.

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With a goal of doing no less than rebuilding human civilization as we know it, Sweden's small but vigorous left-wing Pirate Party earned enough votes in elections held there over the weekend to secure at least one seat in the European Parliament.

Rallying support through the well-publicized Pirate Bay trial, the Pirate Party was able to secure 7.1% of Sweden's popular vote, which guarantees it one of the 18 seats in EU Parliament allotted to the country. Based on a platform of copyright and telecommunications reform, the Pirates have become Sweden's largest party among voters under the age of 30, securing more than 20% of voters in that demographic, defeating both the Social Democrats and the Moderates.

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I've got a confession to make: I miss Steve Jobs.

Although I don't believe in worshipping at his altar alongside his legions of ardent fans, I can't deny that a Jobs keynote -- or anything he says, thinks or touches -- is more memorable simply because it came from him. While it's fair to say the vast majority of today's wonder-devices and services exist because of visionaries who had the guts to see beyond the here and now, it's also true that these very individuals have traditionally been quiet geniuses, content to drive their companies from behind a wall of corporate secrecy.

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Download Safari 4 for Windows 4.30.17.0 from Fileforum now.

Perhaps the absence of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, or any hint of his existence, will go down as the biggest disappointment of this year's WWDC conference in San Francisco. But it may be on the top of a list of more than one item, and down that list not too far behind Jobs' no-show, there is this news: The final release version of Safari 4 is not the fastest Web browser on Windows, despite what SVP Phil Schiller told attendees today.

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AT&T subscribers who purchased an iPhone 3G and wish to upgrade to the 3GS early can do so by renewing their 2-year agreement and paying $399 or $499 for the 16GB or 32GB for the new device plus an $18 upgrade fee, the mobile operator said today.

In today's WWDC presentation, Apple listed the new handsets as costing $199 and $299, and did not include the unsubsidized price.

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After a lengthy presentation about the free iPhone 3.0 update (which will cost $9.95 for iPod touch users on June 17) and software support from third party companies such as Line6, Planet Waves, Zipcar, ngmoco:), gameloft, Pasco, and TomTom; Apple unveiled its show-closing announcement, the iPhone 3G S, "the fastest iPhone ever made."

The unit will differ from the previous iPhone generations in that it will support 7.2 Mbps HSDPA, include an Autofocus 3 Megapixel camera with a 30 fps video mode, an internal magnetic compass, improved battery life, and hardware encryption and come in 16 GB and 32 GB varieties for $199 and $299 respectively. Outwardly, the device looks identical to its predecessors, and offers a similar 3.5" multi-touchscreen, volume rocker, sleep/wake, and single home button.

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Among today's announcements at Apple's WWDC, iPhone Software Senior Vice President Scott Forstall presented many of the new updates coming with the iPhone 3.0 software upgrade, which will endow the popular iPhone with more than 100 new features. Among these will include the highly demanded support for MMS and bluetooth data tethering, which the popular device has lacked.

Unfortunately, though, the United States' exclusive iPhone carrier AT&T was not listed among the launch partners supporting these updated services, which elicited boos from the audience this morning. The new 3.0-enabled tethering feature was simply listed as being available "later this summer," from 22 carriers worldwide, but with no mention of AT&T.

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Sporting new displays, a new non-removable Lithium Polymer battery with a promised 7-hour charge, an SD card slot in place of ExpressCard slots, and offering a new 13" option, Apple's 2009 notebooks comprise its "most affordable lineup ever."

At the bottom of the revised lineup is the new 13" aluminum unibody MacBook Pro, with a 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB and SD card slot for $1,199. This can be upgraded to a 2.54 GHz Core2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, and 250 GB of storage for $1,499.

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As of about 10:45 am PDT this morning, the "beta" label still appeared on the download page for Safari 4, though we expect the label to be dropped perhaps within the hour.

Betanews will certainly be testing Schiller's claim that Safari 4 is the fastest Web browser on all platforms, but throughout the beta period, it did run circles around Firefox and even bested Google Chrome. The last beta build to be distributed, however, encountered performance problems in the Windows 7 RC that it didn't face in Windows Vista SP2. We'll find out whether Apple corrected those deficiencies in time.

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If last Friday's Release Candidate for Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 is truly indicative of the final release (last week's was not, unfortunately), then how much faster performance will Firefox users expect to see the moment they install it? When the organization first started seriously ramping up the development of its TraceMonkey JavaScript engine last year, we said that speed boost would have to be in the triple-digit range to keep up with competition, as well as to meet the high expectations Mozilla set.

Today, Betanews tests have a preliminary answer, and it's exactly what developers have been looking for: A speed score of 253% that of the Windows 7 RC -- better than two and a half times the speed of version 3.0.10 -- and 222% that of Windows Vista SP2, in tests conducted with the "Beta 99" release candidate build posted last Friday, versus the current stable Firefox release. The general public may get a chance to see that performance improvement later this week, assuming this time Mozilla releases Firefox 3.5 RC to the general public as planned.

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