Latest Technology News

Yesterday, without much explanation or instructions, Google opened the floodgates on what it's describing as the next generation of its search engine, most likely to test its efficiency and performance using real-world traffic. Testers are being invited to sample the new engine that Google is calling "Caffeine," although perhaps intentionally, it isn't yet explaining just what the differences are.

In Betanews' initial tests Tuesday morning comparing Caffeine to Google's current stable release, we noticed that for nearly every simple and complex search query we tried, the top three non-paid search results were always the same. But the order of results starting as high as #4, sometimes #6, changed. Usually Caffeine retrieved the same pages as the stable version, but shuffled them in a different order.

Joshua Schachter, founder of social bookmarking site Delicious, said in a forum posting yesterday that he regrets selling Delicious to Yahoo.

The discussion centered around Apache Hadoop creator Doug Cutting, who announced this week that he's leaving Yahoo to join Cloudera, an enterprise support service for Hadoop users.

SlingPlayer Mobile is an application for mobile devices that lets Slingbox users stream content from their television to their phone regardless of their location. Sling Media created apps for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian, PalmOS, and most recently, iPhone OS. The app for iPhone and iPod Touch was released in May, costs $30, and works with Slingbox Solo, Pro, and Pro-HD set-top boxes.

Unfortunately, there have been a couple of major complaints about the app by users. Firstly, it doesn't work with older Slingboxes and secondly, it can only stream content to the iPhone or iPod over Wi-Fi.

Of the three most recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, the one used by more individuals and businesses worldwide, according to recent analytics, is the oldest: IE6, which is notorious for interpreting Web pages in the manner that seemed most convenient to Microsoft at the time. Many Web sites anxious to support newer and more efficient rendering standards remain reluctant to drop support for IE6 rendering entirely, simply because it may still be in use by as much as one-third of the Web-browsing public.

Now that the movement by Web architects to engineer a collective dumping of IE6 has generated its own Web site, the move is on to spur Microsoft itself to join in. After all, the success of IE8 could depend on businesses' willingness to dump IE6. But in a plea to Web architects to understand the difficulties those businesses face in dumping any old software and adopting any new ones (and avoiding Firefox in the process), Microsoft IE8 product manager Dean Hachamovitch wrote for his team's blog that Microsoft simply cannot drop support for IE6 while support for the operating system that delivered it -- Windows XP -- continues.

After Facebook announced that it would be acquiring social sharing service Friendfeed, Facebook engineering manager Akhil Wable announced that Facebook was in the midst of improving its in-site Search features as well.

Users can enter the term they want to find in the search field, then results can be filtered to include posts by friends, fan groups, or pages viewable to all users, as well as events, applications, and the Web as a whole.

Until today, there were only a couple of important bits of information about Microsoft's new multi-touch Zune that were left unknown: the price and the date of availability. Now, thanks to a Best Buy Leak, even those mysteries have been exposed.

On September 8th, the 16GB Zune HD will be available at $220, while the 32GB model will cost $290 (versus $299 and $399 for the 16GB and 32GB iPod Touch.)

Last week's monumentally scaled denial-of-service attacks -- more recently attributed to a massive attack on a Georgian professor and part of the ongoing dispute between Russia and Georgia -- once again showed just how soft Twitter's soft underbelly is. And for a service used by 44 million people last month, getting hauled to its knees by a bunch of political/cultural enemies intent on opening up a new front in a simmering regional conflict isn't exactly a sign that all's well on the security front.

If Twitter were a bank, the angry mobs would have already descended on Capitol Hill, pitchforks in hand, calling for someone's head. But since Twitter's just an itty-bitty message service, and since it's free, it gets a pass. It shouldn't.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 code-name "Namoroka" for Windows from Fileforum now.

Last April, Mozilla gave the first public indication of the feature set it was planning for the version of Firefox that could be released in the fall of this year. Among them were the following: a thumbnail preview mode for tab switching using Ctrl+Tab; an integrated, if limited, version of the Ubiquity command line tool; live theme changes without reboots; a new and more fully loaded "New Tab" feature; a complete status window that answers to the URL about:me; and integration of the desktop Web application platform Prism.

Popular social networking site Facebook has bought FriendFeed.com, and will be taking its entire staff aboard, the companies announced this afternoon.

"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO.

Today, bankrupt-but-bailed-out automobile company General Motors announced it will be attempting to sell cars on eBay in a move to reach out to new customers and possibly reclaim some market share.

Beginning tomorrow, approximately 225 California Chevrolet, Buick, Pontiac, and GMC dealerships will put some 20,000 cars up on a new dedicated portal (gm.ebay.com) with "buy it now" prices which are negotiable.

Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski is stepping down from his position today as the nearly bankrupt Canadian telecommunications company continues its liquidation and reconstruction.

After losing almost $7 billion in two years, Nortel filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in January of this year.

In a statement this morning that included a blessing from an Intel vice president, GPU maker Nvidia announced it has been licensed by Intel, along with other leading motherboard manufacturers, to produce its GPU-stacking SLI technology for motherboards that include Intel's Lynnfield generation Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs using Nehalem microarchitecture, with Intel's P55 Express chipset.

It's great news for system builders who had been concerned about whether a recent legal standoff between Nvidia and Intel would render it impossible (or at least, unsanctioned) for them to build performance gaming systems with the latest Intel 45 nm CPUs, plus multiple Nvidia GPUs. Simply being blockaded from doing so at the legal level would be perceived as a watershed moment for rival ATI, which wouldn't be good news for Intel either since ATI is now wholly owned by arch-rival AMD.

There's an old business saying: If you want to make money in a gold rush, don't prospect, sell shovels. This is the same sort of idea that happened with Twitter and URL shorteners.

URL shortening services are the shovels of the Twitter gold rush, except nobody's making any money selling them.

Microsoft's sale of Razorfish, which for only two years served as its creative advertising division, to French ad giant Publicis Groupe is not so much the indication of a new trend, but of an old trend that is being suspended for now, perhaps for some very old-fashioned reasons.

In the present-day Internet business model, the principal generator of revenue is advertising. Unless a Web site or publisher is in the music delivery business, or happens to be one of the world's few paid search providers, there's few other alternatives for a steady source of income. But as with nearly all media these days, publishers are contending with whether they actually need to invest in the creative side of the process -- why not let someone else create the content, or better yet, let's see if someone will volunteer to do it for free.

Toshiba this morning announced that it has applied for membership in the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), the body in charge of standardizing and evangelizing the high definition disc format, and that it intends to launch Blu-ray notebooks and standalone players this year.

"In light of recent growth in digital devices supporting the Blu-ray format, combined with market demand from consumers and retailers alike, Toshiba has decided to join the BDA," read the company's statement this morning.