Latest Technology News

While awaiting the first public (non-nightly build) copy of Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, we noticed this week the first nightly alpha build of the Mozilla browser to come afterward: the first 3.6 Alpha 1 builds. In Betanews initial performance tests of some of Mozilla's very latest code, there's a lot of room for encouragement: The latest code-name "Minefield" build posted 11.7% better performance overall than the last code-frozen nightly build of Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, and 232% the overall performance of the latest Firefox 3.0.9, released just yesterday.

Our tests pit the latest Windows-based Web browsers in a virtual Vista system, and combine the Acid3 standards test with three trusted performance tests for CSS rendering and JavaScript speed. Nearly all the early news for the 3.6 alpha was good, including posting Mozilla's best-ever score on the Acid3 test -- a 94% -- and posting a Betanews cumulative index score for the first time above 10.0, which means this alpha performs over ten times better than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (not the current version, IE8, but the previous one).

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Security company Check Point Software has begun accepting testers for its ZoneAlarm Full Disk Encryption for Laptops beta program, a program designed to make sensitive data saved on notebooks more difficult to extract if the computer is stolen.

While Full Disk Encryption is turned on, the user must enter an additional password before Windows starts up. Once in Windows, the software encrypts unused files, including even deleted and temporary ones, and decrypts only the files currently in use.

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Instant-on capability isn't entirely unknown on Windows machines, but those who spend too much time around Mac or Linux folk may find that its availability -- mostly laptops and tablets, mostly higher-end gear -- is too limited to countenance. To the rescue comes Xandros' Presto Instant-On -- as long as you're willing to apply yourself to a bit of setup effort. (Think of it as making time to save time.)

Xandros has been making a name for itself on various fronts, most interestingly as part of the software that made the first Eee netbooks such a kick in the pants for the PC market. They're good at interoperability across Windows and Linux, and the Presto software takes good advantage of Linux's speed and light system load while behaving -- we found -- as politely as one might hope for a Windows app.

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You've got just a few hours to cast your vote for your preferred documents of Facebook governance. Do you prefer the current Facebook-written terms of use (the ones to which the site rolled back after that disastrous sortie back in February)? Or are you more in tune with the version incorporating comments from users and advice from experts not named Zuckerberg? Over half a million people so far have an opinion on the matter.

The gist of the user-input version, as summarized in a Facebook Town Hall blog post, is clarity: clear language, clear limits on how Facebook can use user content, and clear procedures for changing terms of service. And though we don't mean to mess things up with a premature exit poll, there's clearly a preference already among voters, with around three-quarters of the "electorate" pulling for the crowdsourced version of the terms of service. Voting ends today at 11:59am Pacific; go now.

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If you were on the red team back in Format War II, also known as HD DVD vs. Blu-ray, you may have been left with substantial library of obsolete HD DVD titles. Warner Bros. is now offering a hand to those early adopters worried about having a dead library, a trade-in program called Red2Blu.

It hearkens back to box-top trade-in incentives from the heyday of breakfast cereals. For every Warner Bros. HD DVD you purchased, you can mail the cover art and $4.95 back to the company, and the company will send you the same movie on Blu-ray. There are 128 HD DVD titles from Warner Bros. that are available for trade, and each user can trade up to 25 discs.

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During Congressional hearings back in July 2007, legislators were astounded by high-profile testimony from former NATO Supreme Commander Gen. Wesley Clark, revealing that federal employees who had installed the P2P software LimeWire on their computers inadvertently shared classified government materials with other LimeWire users, in many cases without those users even requesting the material.

But sidestepping the entire question of why P2P file-sharing software was installed on government computers in the first place, Rep. Darrell Issa (R - Calif.), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, quizzed Lime Group Chairman Mark Gorton about his personal responsibility for the security breaches. Calling him the "elephant in the room," Rep. Issa asked, "Are you prepared here today to say you're going to make significant changes in the software to help prevent this in the future?" Gorton responded, "Absolutely, and we have some in the works right now."

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According to an account from a pool reporter assigned to Vice President Biden yesterday, and covered in its entirety by Time Magazine's Mark Halperin, Mr. Biden told a Washington gathering of both senior senators and motion picture industry leaders that he plans to accelerate the search for an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC).

Though the role has been treated as a creation of the Obama administration, it was President Bush who signed into law last October the controversial PRO-IP Act, stepping up enforcement provisions against intellectual property infringement and piracy, and creating the role Mr. Biden likes to refer to as a "czar." But it was Biden himself who coined the usage of the term "czar" to apply to policy leaders with authority over specific issues, who report directly to the President -- in this case, in 1982 when then-Senator Biden helped create a drug policy enforcement administrator.

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Another Apple earnings report, another vacation from dreary recession news in the Cupertino Reality Field: The company reported on Wednesday its best non-holiday quarter in history this afternoon, with year-to-year sales of iPods and iPhones up 3% and 123% respectively. The company posted Q2 '09 revenue of $8.16 billion and a net profit of $1.21 billion, working out to $1.33 per share.

The company reported 9% year-over-year revenue growth, and an operating margin of 20.4%.

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Download Mozilla Firefox 3.0.9 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Bugs in versions of Firefox before 3.0.9 can lead to memory corruption -- a problem that might, in theory be used by bad people to run arbitrary code on your machine. The problem is also present in versions of Thunderbird before 2.0.0.22 -- if you've gone and enabled JavaScript in e-mail -- and of SeaMonkey before 1.1.16.

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In February, the US Senate cut nearly $250 million in aid to the motion picture industry from the economic stimulus bill. Legislators determined that Hollywood studios didn't need the "bailout" after enjoying several months of record-breaking sales.

Yesterday, however, the Motion Picture Association of America attempted to show lawmakers how important the entertainment industry is to the global economy, releasing a study (PDF available here) which suggests, "The production and distribution of motion pictures and television programs is one of the nation's most valuable cultural and economic resources," and therefore worthy of hefty tax breaks.

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The European Commission's quest to end "roaming ripoffs" on text message and data charges incurred while roaming in the EU has come to a triumphant end.

The European Commission's proposal (PDF available here) to cap wholesale data roaming rates and roaming text costs was approved by the Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council in December and was approved yesterday by the European Parliament.

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Already, AMD has a low-power segment to its Opteron server processor line, the HE series. With Intel Xeon processors still holding a measurable performance lead -- especially with models that command a comfortable premium -- AMD needs to be able to compete efficiently and maintain that goal of 40% gross margin (it made 43% last quarter). And to do that, the company feels it needs a new product category for a certain segment of customers who may be willing to pay a bit extra for something particularly useful.

If that's not performance, then for now, maybe it can be very low power consumption. This afternoon, the company announced a new and exclusive segment of Opteron EE quad-core processors that are intentionally turned down, drawing 40 watts of average CPU power (ACP, which is AMD's own metric) versus 75 watts for the standard Opteron and 55 watts for the company's Opteron HEs -- which will continue to exist as an in-between choice.

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Dell first launched the Studio 15 at

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For your Earth Day reading enjoyment, the folks at Retrevo (that indispensable source for the product manual you were just sure you'd never need to open again -- you know, the one you tossed two days before you desperately needed page 47) have a nice PDF guide to greening your electronics usage without tearing your hair out.

And if 30 pages is too much greenery for you -- a real possibility according to a recent Retrevo survey -- we talked them out of one tip that everyone should be able to handle.

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During a press webcast Wednesday afternoon, AMD server business unit VP Pat Patla verified yesterday's news revealed during the company's quarterly earnings call yesterday, but then added one big component: In addition to six-core "Istanbul" Opteron server CPUs for 2P, 4P, and 8P servers available as soon as this June -- moved up from the second half of the year -- the first of AMD's 45 nm 12-core Opteron server CPUs will become available next year.

The "dodeca-core" processor will be made possible through an upgraded version of AMD's Direct Connect Architecture, now numbered 2.0. Patla showed off an accelerated roadmap for future server CPUs, which from here on out divides Opteron series into two families -- the general-performance 4000 series and the higher-performance 6000 series -- featuring 16-core "Valencia" and "Interlagos" architecture 32 nm CPUS, respectively, as soon as 2011.

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