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Before I start rambling, I’d like to start off by saying that I never really got into the whole microblogging scene. I tried, time and time again, but it just never kept me interested for very long. Maybe that’s why one day I went as far as getting down on my knees and begged God for microblogging to go away so that I wouldn’t have to keep hearing about the latest Twitter outage from all my favourite news sites. As time went by though, I quickly realized that Twitter, and microblogging in general, was here to stay. That’s why today you’re seeing me post my first ever microblogging-related story, and as much as I find the whole ongoing development very interesting, it will probably be my last.
So why do I say that Facebook could kill off Twitter? Well, because it had microblogging before Twitter was a baby (yeah, I know, Twitter still is a damn baby). You can argue day and night that wall-to-wall posts aren’t mini blog posts, but you can’t deny that Status Updates are exactly what Twitter has been doing from the very start. Think about it. Status Updates = Tweets. Don’t believe me? Well, there is one difference between the two, and this is really the key to microblogging’s success. On Twitter, you can follow anyone you would like, without their approval. Facebook just won’t let you do that.

read more @ neowin.net

Windows Live Hotmail Wave 3 will be launched shortly. Whats new !?
Faster than ever. It’ll be up to 70 percent faster to sign in and see your e-mail. Of course, along with more speed, you’ll get powerful technology that deflects spam and helps protect you against viruses and scams.
Simpler, cleaner design. We’re combining the classic and full versions of Hotmail, so you get access to everything Hotmail has to offer. The reading pane will let you check out your e-mail without having to open it up.
Put more you in your e-mail. New themes and colors will let you design the look of your inbox, so your personality can really shine through.
Closer to your contacts. Just start typing in the "To" line and you’ll get a choice of e-mail contacts that most closely match what you’ve typed. Plus, it’ll be even easier to e-mail groups of people.

Panasonic will soon begin selling Blu-ray Disc-based video recorders in Europe, it said Thursday at the IFA electronics show in Berlin. The company put its first Blu-ray Disc burners on sale several years ago in Japan but the planned launch of the products in France later this year marks the first time they will be available in Europe.
Using the recorders, consumers will be able to record high-definition TV programs to Blu-ray Disc without losing quality. The only other options available are to record at standard definition to DVD or VHS tape or in high-definition to hard-disk drive, although the latter makes saving favorite programs difficult because of the limited amount of disc space available.

Full story @ PCWorld

Advanced Micro Devices plans to announce its first desktop microprocessors produced using 45nm process technology on the 8th of January, 2009, the first day of Consumer Electronics Show. The code-named Deneb chips will not get truly high clock-speed boost, but will be able to offer substantially higher performance thanks to larger cache and architectural improvements.
The first desktop processors from AMD made using 45nm process technology will be AMD Phenom X4 chips clocked at 2.80GHz and 3.00GHz, sources familiar with AMD’s plans said. The new processors will support both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, but since the initial chips will be available in socket AM2+ form-factor, the chips will have to rely on dual-channel DDR2 PC2-8500 (1066MHz DDR2) memory.

Full story @ Xbit-Labs

With every intention of evening up the score with Firefox 3, Microsoft opened up its public beta process for the first edition of IE8 to contain a full list of new features. Beta 1 (which was launched back in March) concentrated on making the engine work and rendering pages properly; now it’s Beta 2’s turn to dazzle the public.

"We looked very hard at how people really browse the Web. We looked at a lot of data about how people browse and tried a lot of different designs in front of many kinds of people, not just technologists," reads a blog post from IE General Manager Dean Hatchamovitch this afternoon.

To that end, IE8 will work to "one-up" Firefox in a number of regards, including a completely revised, color-coded tab bar that resembles something that’s only in the "laboratory" stage at Mozilla. "IE8…takes into account that there are often relationships between new tabs that users open, and the browser can make it a lot easier to figure out which tabs go with which," Hatchamovitch wrote.

Full story @ betanews.com

Download links: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/worldwide-sites.aspx

Google has commented on our IE8 Beta 1 improvements, and we’ve made IE8 even faster since then. Some of the tests we have done show pure JScript performance improvements up to 2.5 times. We also measured the performance gains on common Gmail operations, like loading the inbox (34%), opening a conversation (45%) and opening a thread (27%) compared to IE7. Thus far, tweaks to the JScript engine have contributed to improve IE8’s performance on the SunSpider benchmarking suite by 400% compared to IE7.
The second area in which we are invested heavily in IE8 is in improvements to our memory usage. To date we have fixed just under 400 separate memory leaks in Internet Explorer. For users, these changes reduce the amount of memory consumed by IE, improve our startup times, speed up navigating between pages, and help IE remain stable for longer periods of time. As we started building IE8 it was clear that we could do more to take advantage of the increasing prevalence of high bandwidth connections. Two key improvements we made with IE8 were to unblock downloads in the presence of external scripts and to increase the number of parallel connections per server that we support.

View: Full Story at IEBlog

Note: This is a Pre-Release BETA, and may not represent the final product. This is an early M1 build so expect it to be buggy! With ongoing releases, build quality will be improved, and this leak should not be used to judge the finaly quality of the feature-complete Windows Live Messenger 2009 in any way.

Click HERE to download

Click HERE to download

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Firefox 3.1 will run many Web-based applications such as Gmail faster through incorporation of a feature called TraceMonkey that dramatically speeds up programs written in JavaScript, Mozilla said Friday.

JavaScript has been very broadly used to add pizzazz or flexibility to Web pages over the years, but in recent years, it’s also become the plumbing for many rich Internet applications. However, because JavaScript has been hobbled by pokey performance, Web-based applications often struggled to work as responsively as "native" software running directly on PCs, and programmers writing Web applications have often turned to other options, such as Adobe Systems’ Flash and Flex.

Now Mozilla hopes to change the balance of power in JavaScript’s favor.
"TraceMonkey is a project to bring native code speed to JavaScript," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s interim vice president of engineering, adding that JavaScript performance nearly doubles compared to Firefox 3.0, based on the SunSpider test of JavaScript performance. That speeds up many basic tasks, but it also brings image editing and 3D graphics into JavaScript’s abilities, he said.
TraceMonkey is what’s called a just-in-time compiler, one type of technology that solves the problem of converting programs written by humans into instructions a computer can understand.

Most software that runs on people’s computers is already compiled in advance into what’s called a binary file, but JavaScript usually is interpreted line by line as it runs, a slower process. "We’re getting close to the end of what you can do with an interpreter," Shaver said.
A just-in-time compiler, though, creates that binary file on the fly as the code arrives–when a person visits a new Web page, and the browser encounters JavaScript, for example.