Over the last 10 days, Microsoft has opened two retail stores, in Arizona and California, and a café in France. Bloggers and journalists largely dismissed the retail outlets as Apple Store knock-offs, which is surprising considering reports of 1,000 or more people lined up for the second opening in Mission Viejo, Calif. That said, the numbers aren't confirmed and a free music concert likely bolstered them.

Over the weekend, ifoAppleStore chronicled the Mission Viejo-store opening -- albeit with some pro-Apple, anti-Microsoft commentary -- and large gallery of photos. From the text and pics, Microsoft Store similarities to Apple Store are obvious.

Clearwire and Sprint have been working hard to complete the planned WiMAX network deployment for 2009, and with the addition of a handful of new major markets this week, the project has nearly fulfilled its promises for the year.

Today, Sprint announced it has launched WiMAX services in the North Carolina cities Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, High Point and Cary; in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas; and in Chicago, Illinois.

In what may become the most wide-ranging insider stock trading scheme to be uncovered this decade, evidence uncovered last month by the US Securities and Exchange Commission led to the indictment last week of IBM Senior Vice President Robert Moffat, believed to have been the next-in-line for the CEO post. Moffat was indicted on October 16, arrested on criminal insider trading charges, and has posted $2 million bail, according to reports.

Now, the latest name to become linked to the alleged scheme has submitted his resignation, effective next January, and will take a leave of absence in the interim. Dr. Hector Ruiz was chairman of GlobalFoundries, the manufacturing entity spun off from AMD, which Ruiz led as its chairman and CEO during the dawn of the multicore era.

Say it with me, everyone: Facebook sucks.

I don't mean that in a literal sense, of course. But the growing number of obviously hacked status updates and phishing-like scams coming from folks we all thought were our friends has me wondering if Facebook is having more than a little trouble keeping a lid on the kinds of nasties that have already ruined e-mail, Usenet, and while we're at it, the Web in general.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently voted to move forward on a rule-making process that could lead to new government regulations for the Internet. That is what the FCC and some activist groups want, although they claim to be supporting only "neutrality." Even key players seem confused.

The Open Internet Coalition (OIC) says neutrality "is about keeping the hands of several powerful network operators -- AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast -- off the Internet, preventing them from taking steps to change the basic open nature of the Net that has led to its success."

If Apple's Safari is going to make any kind of a challenge for best performing Windows-based Web browser moving into next year, it needs to be now. In Betanews' most extensive testing to date, involving tests that by anyone's guess should not have given it any special advantages, the latest stable edition of Google Chrome runs away with a three point lead over the latest stable Safari -- a lead that now grows by one-half point with each point release.

Chrome now posts test scores in certain heats of our revised CRPI 2.2 test battery that are virtually obscene -- so far ahead of competition that we have to validate our results on various machines to make sure we're not generating false results. For example: On the control flow element of the SunSpider test, both Chrome 3 and the dev build of Chrome 4 post record low time scores of 2.6 ms. This is an element that tests the JavaScript interpreter's capability to keep track of nested loops and its location in a twisted program. By comparison, the latest public Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 -- released late yesterday afternoon after a flurry of delays totaling over one month -- posts a score of 38.2 ms in that category.

We did not have the Comprehensive Relative Performance Index (CRPI -- the "Creepy Index") out for very long before we found it needed to be changed again. The main reason came from one of the architects of the benchmark suites we use, Web developer Sean Patrick Kane. This week, Kane declared his own benchmark obsolete, and unveiled a completely new system to take its place.

When the author of a benchmark suite says his own methodology was outdated, we really have no choice but to agree and work around it. As you'll see, Kane replaced his original, simple suite that covers all the bases with a very comprehensive, in-depth battery of classic tests called JSBenchmark that covers just one of those bases. For our CRPI index to continue to be fair, we needed not only to compensate for those areas of the old CK index that were no longer covered, but also to balance those missing points with tests that just as comprehensively covered those missing bases.

Let's face facts: The real reason you'd ever want a search engine to locate "similar images" to one or more you're observing at the moment, is because you're not certain of what you're looking for or what you want to find. A search for photographs that look like da Vinci's Mona Lisa is going to turn up more pictures of the same Mona Lisa. And while a search for photos that look like Paris Hilton will turn up more photos of Paris Hilton, a search for photos that look like other one-hit wonders like William Shatner will turn up pictures of folks we may have never heard of, like someone named Mike Vogel.

So while Google Labs' pre-built experimental searches for its first public incarnation of Similar Images, unveiled Wednesday, does demonstrate an uncanny ability to isolate Paris Hilton pictures from its index, the fact that most of those pictures are labeled "Paris Hilton" anyway suggests that these are not real-world experiments. In the real world, people are looking for a picture of that person in that show with the other guy with the weird hair, or a painting from an artist with the funky name. They're looking for the imaging algorithm to fill in the gaps for the information they don't have on hand, not to demonstrate the ability to mimic a successful search when the information is in front of our face.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 from Fileforum now.

One of the nicest new features in Microsoft Windows 7 concerns the revised taskbar, specifically how many more choices are available to you when you right-click an icon, or when you just hover over it to see where all your open windows are. In Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 1, which went live just minutes ago, the browser's integration with the Win7 taskbar is now on a par with that of Internet Explorer 8.

According to Reuters today, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia will reportedly be shutting down its N-Gage gaming service. The shutdown will come six years after the mobile phone and gaming system hybrid concept debuted and was quickly retired; and nearly four years after it was re-invented as a part of Nokia's smartphone ecosystem, and later integrated with the Ovi platform.

Nokia intends to stop publishing new N-Gage titles and eventually wind down the service by the end of next year. Games will still be a major part of the Ovi platform, available in the Ovi Store under store.ovi.com/games, but the dedicated N-Gage brand is finally being scuttled.

The final test editions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8, released while Windows 7 was still in the technical preview phase, suggested that its performance could very well triple that of its predecessor, the venerable IE7. When the RTM edition first became available, its performance was pared down a bit, but still better than double that of IE7, based on Betanews' assessments at the time.

But we've noticed a trend of IE8 performance dragging down over time, while every other major Windows browser in the field was headed the other direction -- and fast. Early this month, when Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 appeared imminent (and still is at this moment), we calculated the performance difference between IE8 and IE7 at about 75%.

Without any notice to current customers with or those early adopters with dormant accounts, Sprint has locked down the Baltimore Xohm WiMAX network and is not letting inactive hardware be turned back on to allow free upgrades to Clear hardware.

Sprint's Xohm network was one of the first two WiMAX deployments in the United States. We watched with excitement as the towers were raised in Baltimore and the ceremonial ribbon was cut on the new high speed wireless network.

The latest version of Canonical's popular Linux distribution Ubuntu (9.10 "Karmic Koala") was officially released today and is now available for download.

Among numerous performance improvements (Upstart native jobs, Intel video driver acceleration switched from "EXA" to "UXA", GRUB 2 boot loader by default, ext4 filesystem by default) and upgrades to the architecture (Linux Kernel 2.6.31, Gnome 2.28, X.Org 7.4, X.Org server 1.6.4, Xsplash and Compiz Fusion 0.8.4), Ubuntu 9.10 has thrown in a couple of compelling new products to make Karmic Koala worth a second look for those still apprehensive about Linux operating systems and largely unfamiliar with all the architectural and environmental upgrades.

I've never been a fan of exclusive deals between handset manufacturers and wireless carriers. I understand why they appeal to the Apples and the AT&Ts of the world in the first place, but it ticks me off that sweet deals like this always seem to leave consumers out in the cold. They limit choice and competition, which tends to keep prices artificially high for longer than they should, and they make it easier for carriers to maintain the kind of old, customer-unfriendly practices that have long stained the industry.

When a given gotta-have-it device is available only through one carrier, consumers are forced to make a Hobson's Choice in that they can choose by device, or by carrier, but not both. And if they dislike the exclusive carrier for any reason, they either hold their noses and sign, or learn to live with another carrier's second-rate hardware.

At a sneak preview in New York City on Thursday night, execs from Verizon Wireless, Motorola, and Google gave reporters from Betanews and elsewhere a point-by-point illustration, supported by a few of Android's 10,000-plus apps. They also showed off some features not even mentioned in Verizon's anti-iPhone marketing blitz: a stellar 3.7-inch high res display, turn-by-turn GPS voice navigation with Google Latitude and Street Views, and innovative peripherals like a car mount and multimedia station.

In a scathing new ad campaign, Verizon takes aim at everything Apple's rival iPhone doesn't do. "iDon't have a real keyboard," according to an ad. "iDon't run simultaneous apps," and so on, and so forth.