Today AMD announces 45nm quad-core Opteron processors, codenamed “Shanghai” designed to deliver superior virtualization experience, performance and power efficiency.

The touted highlights of these new pieces of silicon are many and varied:

• Extending virtualization capabilities.
• Up to 35% more performance compared to “Barcelona” Opteron CPUs while having the same power envelope.
• The only x86 processor spanning 2, 4 and 8 processor servers while maintaining socket and thermal compatibility with previous generation processors.
• Approximately 35% less power usage at idle “Barcelona” Opteron CPUs

Read more @ Zdnet.com

Microsoft’s Live.com portal will change significantly this evening. No longer will it be a simple search engine with a few other services bolted on. It’s now a social network, too, pulling in activity information and content from around the web. They’re also launching Windows Live Photos and Windows Live People, and other services. Check it out at Home.Live.com.

A lot of what they’ve done is exactly what Yahoo has been talking about for over a year now - leveraging social connections that already exist (Yahoo is using email, Microsoft is using Messenger) and doing a lot more with it.

Users are automatically connected with any friends they have on Windows Live Messenger, which is by far the most popular instant messaging service worldwide (Comscore: Microsoft Messenger has 268 million worldwide users, compared to 116 million for Yahoo and 6 million for Google Talk).

Read more @ TechCrunch

Popacular, a site that measures popularity of websites according to the number of related tweets, has a huge counter that counts the overall number of tweets. I don’t know how accurate this thing can be, given that it’s third party, but if it is, then we’ve recently surpassed the billionth tweet mark.

This is just another sign of how big Twitter has become. For comparison, Facebook recently announced they host 10 billion photos in their database; however, Facebook is huge and has been around much longer than Twitter. If anyone ever needed a clear sign that Twitter has gone mainstream - however you define it - this milestone is it.

Also, seeing that counter spin amazingly fast makes us sorry for all those times we’ve made fun of Twitter’s engineers for not being able to keep the site up during a traffic rush. Sorry, guys, we understand now.

Source: Mashable

With Black Friday sale information from rival PC vendors beginning to leak online, experts at Barclays Capital say they expect Apple to counter the promotions with a more aggressive than usual one-day sale, offering deep discounts on a number of Mac models.

The Friday immediately following the US Thanksgiving holiday has long been known as "Black Friday," as it represents the unofficial beginning of the holiday shopping season, or the day when retailers hold massive sales in hopes of steering their (red) losses into (black) profits.
Among the most heavily discounted electronics items poised to dominate this year’s sales are low cost notebooks, according to analyst Ben Reitzes, who notes that Dell plans to offer $299 linux model via its website, while Wal-Mart markets a $299 Compaq, and Best Buy a $299 eMachines portable.
"We believe ultra-low cost notebooks will be a major draw this Black Friday as vendors look to push volumes and consumers look to trade down given the economic environment," he wrote in a report to clients Wednesday. "We have not seen any Apple Black Friday ads yet (as is customary), but expect the company to be more aggressive than usual in its one-day sale, perhaps with $100 off a few Mac models and discounts on several iPods."

Read more @ Apple Insider

Testfreaks.com, the website that publishes reviews of all new technology products, with prices, blog posts, forum threads, news, rumors, manufacturers descriptions and specifications, manuals, videos and more.

Recently, testfreaks.com published a review about the new Blackberry Storm 9500.

The BlackBerry Storm 9500 is the latest incarnation in a long line of BlackBerry models, it is the flagship of the RIM phone line now, but this one is a bit different, and it’s a very highly anticipated version of this popular style of phone among business users and consumers alike.

The 9500 is very different than all of the previous generations of BlackBerries, it marks a large step forward in the thinking and design of the RIM line of phones. All of RIMs phones to date have had either full or half keyboards on them, the 9500 though has none at all, at least in the form of hardware, the 9500 does have a full touchscreen QWERTY keyboard in landscape mode and what RIM is calling Suretype in portrait mode, where the keys each have three letters, similar to a standard phone. Suretype is supposed to anticipate what the user is going to type and is supposedly very accurate.

The touchscreen feature of the 9500 is a bit late to the BlackBerry line of phones, as most other phone makers have introduced touchscreen phones quite a while ago, especially to the smartphone crowd. One has to wonder how well the BlackBerry OS and style of navigation can be transferred over to the touchscreen. Preliminary results, or testings, have shown though that RIM did a very good job with the interface, and even those accustomed to their BlackBerries should have no problem picking up and utilizing the new interface quickly.

Continue reading @ TestFreaks.com