Download Exchange Server 2010 x64 Release Candidate from Fileforum now.

This morning, a Microsoft spokesperson told Betanews that the company will be making available the first public release candidate for its Exchange Server 2010 e-mail server today. As of late Tuesday morning, the links still pointed to the last ES 2010 public beta.

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Mozilla Firefox users awoke this morning to the news in their RSS feeds that the organization had dared to send push notes to its users urging them to upgrade to a Web browser version that was, as the report put it, ".NET incompatible." Hopefully, Firefox veterans knew what was really going on.

Users who upgrade their Firefox versions a few times per month anyway have seen this all before, and have long since discovered there's no need to panic: Microsoft's .NET Framework Assistant add-on has a habit of showing up in users' Firefox plug-ins list without them even asking for it. Its purpose is not to make Firefox compatible with .NET -- anyone who's installed Silverlight 3 in Firefox knows that. What it does is give .NET apps designed to be run through the browser a kind of hook to the .NET runtime -- a hook that Internet Explorer includes by design -- so that these apps can check their servers and update themselves.

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Though it's been in private testing for some time, the Silverlight 2.0 work-alike system for Linux built by the open source Mono Project is now ready to present itself to the general public. This afternoon (after a few fits and starts), Moonlight 2.0 Beta 1 was released for general testing, with one of the runtime module's ambitious new features being the enablement of different media codecs, including Mono's own rendition of open-source Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, and BBC Dirac.

Although multiple video codec support is slated for inclusion by Microsoft in Silverlight 3, Mono team lead developer Miguel de Icaza said today that he decided to implement the media pipeline feature from Silverlight 3 into the 2.0 specifically "to play back media files that use the open codecs or to plug your own media codecs." De Icaza only expressed his interest in tackling this bit of functionality just last March.

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Today, the US Department of Justice announced that a 28-year-old hacker and former Secret Service informant named Albert Gonzales is being indicted for the third and, by far, the largest crime of his short career: participation in the theft of more than 130 million credit and debit card mag-strip data dumps, in attacks between 2006 and 2008.

Gonzales was already in federal custody for several major data breaches. He faces trial in New York next month for the first, which involved hacking restaurant Dave and Busters' payment system. Then the second case will be heard in Boston in 2010 for Gonzales' involvement in the theft of data off of more than 40 million credit card mag-strips from OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble, BJ's Wholesale Club, and many more.

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For some time now, Chinese engineers have been working on an offshoot of the Android smartphone OS that uses a proprietary front-end, with the intention of creating a network for functions and applications that will rival that of Apple's iPhone. It's being called the Open Mobile System (OMS), and the app platform is now being referred to as Ophone.

This morning overseas, China Mobile showed off its newly completed Mobile Market applications store, the country's first competitive online market for Ophone apps. Since there is no single Ophone unit for China, multiple manufacturers may be involved in producing the phones themselves; and as attendees of this morning's event learned to their surprise, Dell -- the company that has long been hesitant to enter this market -- was one of them.

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HTC's 'Sense' UI is a large part of what makes the HTC Hero such a desirable handset for Android fans. The interface, centered mostly around home screen widgets, was debuted earlier in the summer and was expected to arrive on other "non-Google" HTC Android handsets.

Since there are only three HTC Android handsets, and all of them are Google-branded in the US so far, this meant at the time that the UI was not coming to the States.

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Marc Andreessen is a brilliant guy. His Mosaic browser, which eventually morphed into Netscape, introduced us all to the concept of surfing and ushered in the Internet as we know it. His new way of looking at online services -- which seems ho-hum today but was radically transformational 15 years ago -- freed us forever from the tyranny of arcane, unfortunately named services like Archie, Veronica, Jughead, and Gopher. In taking Netscape public, he set the stage for dot.com-era IPOs that created countless tech billionaires-as-rock-stars and defined an era when technology's potential was seemingly limitless. Let's call him brilliant and visionary, then.

However, even geniuses have their bad days...sometimes, they have many. Netscape was eventually wiped off the relevance map when Microsoft finally woke up to the Internet reality and paved over the landscape with Internet Explorer. The Internet bubble burst as the perverse logic that drove much of it -- eyeballs, "stickiness," and the ridiculous notion that bricks-and-mortar were headed for permanent and complete obsolescence -- was finally and thankfully replaced by the old rules of business that dictated you needed to generate revenue, and that revenue needed to exceed your costs.

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It's difficult to say which company has suffered most from the bad global economic climate -- Nokia, Motorola, or Sony Ericsson -- but if you ask any of their executives candidly, they'll probably point to their own firms. Last quarter, Sony Ericsson reported shipping 43% fewer phones than in the same quarter of 2008; and in terms of income, the company is bleeding at the rate of a third of a billion euro per quarter.

At the time, company president Dick Komiyama promised he would continue focusing on a return to profitability. This morning, it was learned that Sony has told the division president he can start thinking about focusing someplace else -- preferably, retirement. Effective immediately, Ericsson Executive Vice President Bert Norberg will scoot Komiyama to just a part of the president's chair, until the last quarter of the year when Komiyama will be out altogether. Though Komiyama will officially be sharing the presidency with Norberg until then, no one's under any illusion that this sharing will be anything more than official.

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With the future of the Pirate Bay still up in the air, an anonymous user has created an archive of the torrent indexing site just in case things don't go well with its acquisition and transition into a "legitimate" service.

The user has made a mostly complete archive of The Pirate bay and all of its 873,671 hosted torrents available as a 21.3 GB download. The Pirate Bay's tracker claims to track over 2 million torrents, but most of these were not hosted by the Pirate Bay.

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You know why there are so many Apple rumors? Because they don't talk to the media. So when someone is guaranteed to have an audience with Apple where the company is legally bound to answer the questions, it's a golden opportunity to learn about the tight-lipped company's strange and wondrous ways.

Stouthearted Mac clone maker Psystar announced that it will have its turn to depose Apple in its litigation over the company's unauthorized use of OS X on its PCs.

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That girl from that show. Any good search engine should respond to an explicit and well-phrased query, but we all know that not every user will be able to craft a query that will enable a search engine that catalogs images to associate an image with the phrase. Last June, we had our search engines try to pull up a picture of actor Rod Taylor, using only scant information about him. And it was funny perusing through catalogs containing Johnny Depp and Zachary Quinto and Arnold Schwarzenegger and a lost gosling on a rainy highway, all of which reside on pages whose terms had to do vaguely with the things in our query that had to do vaguely with Rod Taylor.

For our rematch, we portrayed a user looking for the picture and identity of an actress who portrayed author Jane Austen in a movie about Jane Austen, not by Jane Austen. I know, you're thinking Anne Hathaway; no, this one was from British TV, and for the sake of the challenge, we'll pretend we don't remember the name of the show. We'll know her when we see her.

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Just as Verizon has predicted since late 2007, the company has completed its first trials of LTE (Third Generation Partnership Project's Long Term Evolution), the as-of-yet non-standardized 4G wireless technology.

Verizon was able to make calls in the 700 MHz spectrum based on the 3GPP's Release 8 LTE standard in trial deployments in Seattle and Boston. The company was able to stream video, upload and download files and browse the Web, but most importantly, it was able to complete voice calls.

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Everybody is scrambling for his or her broadband stimulus money.

5:00 p.m. EDT today was scheduled to be the deadline for funding applications under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but because of overwhelming traffic on the government's servers, the deadline has been extended to next Thursday, August 20.

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The story so far: We're in the initial phase of the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview, a period of private and public testing that could last for the better part of a year. So far, the biggest complaint we're seeing emerge is that so little is changing, that it's becoming more difficult for Microsoft to make the value proposition for why businesses and individuals should upgrade from Office 2007 or even 2003. In the absence of viable, existing reasons why the new Office will be better than the old one, a couple of Microsoft employees launched a Web site this week, asking people to come up with their own reasons and vote up each other's best responses.

Right now, the number one suggestion users have for "making Office better" is the restoration of an old feature that existed in Office XP. The #3 suggestion for Word: Give users the option to bring back the Office 2003 menu bar. (You can just hear Carmi Levy cheering that suggestion.) So to recap, from both Microsoft and its users, nothing new yet, but plenty of pleas to bring back old stuff that was just fine.

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Mobile video streaming site Qik, which was introduced last year is leading the charge into the next generation of the Web. Think of it as a real-time YouTube where a user's mobile phone is paired with an online channel that broadcasts live video streamed from his handset camera over 3G. The service's value for citizen journalism is undeniable.

Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Android all have the ability to stream live video to Qik, and the iPhone 3G S just got an app for the service for the first time yesterday.

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