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Firefox 3 Download Record Official

Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period. The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads took place in June. “The enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was key to making this happen,” said marketing head Paul Kim.

iPhone 3G Set For 8AM Debut On July 11

If you’re the sort of person who creates countdown widgets for major Apple product releases, you’ve now got an official Zero Hour for the iPhone 3G launch, straight from AT&T. The exclusive iPhone service provider in the U.S. says that the latest version of the iPhone will go on sale at 8 a.m. local time on Friday, July 11.

Bye, Bill. A Fond Remembrance

From that great family of pioneers, only two names remain prominent in the public conscience: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. On this final day of Bill Gates’ salaried employ at the company he founded, we recall a period of history way, way back — an era when Gates was one giant among many.

One Billion PCs Are Now In Use

The figures relate to computers that are actually being used, as opposed to those that have merely been shipped over a period of time. Over half of these PCs (58 per cent) are based in established markets such as Western Europe, Japan and the US.

MIT Students Develop Revolutionary Solar Dish That Is Hot Enough To Melt Steel

Trend Micro’s CEO threw down the gauntlet to her competitors last week, proclaiming that hackers are ahead of the game and that the anti-virus industry “sucks”. Chief exec Eva Chen announced last Wednesday a radical shift in business strategy for Trend Micro’s anti-virus software.

Records kept at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, an external company used by Google and other companies to handle human-resources functions, were stolen in a burglary on 26 May.

An undisclosed number of employees’ details and those of dependents, such as names, addresses, and social security numbers, were on the stolen computers. It is understood that Colt did not employ encryption to protect the information.

It is still unclear how many more of Colt Express’s clients were affected by the breach. US employees of CNET Networks (publisher of ZDNet.co.uk) were also affected by the burglary, with around 6,500 employees’ details stolen.

News Source: ZDNet UK
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Following the recent launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 GPUs, AMD plans to introduce the high-end dual-GPU HD 4870 X2 by the end of July, according to sources at graphics card vendors.

Evaluation samples are schedule to be available in mid-July, and AMD will begin shipping reference design boards with 2GB GDDR5 memory at the end of the month, the sources detailed.

News Source: DigiTimes
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Solid-state disks may be eating into the territory of traditional hard drives, particularly in laptops, but that doesn’t mean spinning platters are on their last legs – particularly not at Hitachi.

Hard drive specialist Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is continuing to push HDDs to the limit, with a strong emphasis on increasing capacity and with a clear goal in mind.

News Source: TechRadar
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Secunia researchers detected numerous security vulnerabilities in the Mozilla Firefox 2.0x Web browser, many of which enable malicious attackers to hack into vulnerable systems and either shut down or take complete control of a user’s computer.

Researchers at Secunia, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based security company specializing in vulnerability assessment and management, issued a security advisory Wednesday, warning users of multiple errors they deemed “highly critical.”

If exploited, the critical vulnerabilities could potentially allow remote attackers to conduct cross-site scripting and spoofing attacks, bypass security restrictions, disclose sensitive or system information, potentially compromise a user’s system, access a user’s system or launch a denial of service attack, according to the advisory.

News Source: CRN
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Mozilla Labs has announced the availability of Weave 0.2, the third major release of its experimental Firefox synchronization add-on. This version brings a broader feature set, improved reliability, and streamlined notification support. Although it is still in the early testing stage, Weave is already effective and easy to use.

When Mozilla launched Weave in December, the add-on offered basic support for storing the user’s Firefox bookmarks and history in the cloud, allowing the synchronization of the data between computers. The latest version extends this functionality to also cover cookies, passwords, tabs, and form contents. Future versions will go further and also support synchronizing the user’s extensions, themes, and search plugins. Mozilla intends to eventually implement an API that will enable third-party Firefox extensions to leverage Weave’s synchronization capabilities for other kinds of user data.

News Source: Ars Technica
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Microsoft is encouraging its partners to do more to help SMEs purchase the most appropriate version of Windows Vista.

The software giant claims that 60 per cent of UK SMEs will potentially buy the wrong operating system for their needs in its next fiscal year, which it highlighted as a key concern at its recent quarterly partner briefing.

It estimated that 2.6 million PCs will be refreshed in the SME space over the next 12 months.

News Source: CRN
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Microsoft is dangling prizes made by arch-nemesis Apple to entice Australian web surfers to give its online search products a second chance.

Through its local joint venture with the Nine Network, ninemsn, Microsoft recently completed a full revamp of Live Search to improve results and integrate video, images, news and maps into search queries.

But in what is perhaps a sign of desperation given Google’s growing market share dominance, ninemsn is running a new Live Search promotion - Secret Search - offering surfers the chance to win prizes including the iPod Nano, Shuffle and Touch just for conducting searches.

News Source: The Age
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Microsoft Corp is preparing a new bid for Yahoo Inc’s search business and has approached other media companies about joining it in a deal that would effectively lead to Yahoo’s breakup, the Wall Street Journal said.

Microsoft has already held talks with Time Warner Inc and News Corp, among others, the newspaper quoted people familiar with the discussions as saying.

The talks are preliminary and unlikely to result in a deal with Yahoo, the paper said.

News Source: Reuters
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Businesses with less than 1000 staff should consider replacing in-house e-mail servers with webmail to reduce the cost of providing e-mail for end users, analyst firm Gartner has advised.

Matthew Cain, research vice-president at Gartner, said companies with fewer than 1,000 seats would gain significantly from the webmail approach.

Geographically dispersed organisations and those that required less than 99% uptime should also consider the webmail model to simplify support and improve uptime, he said.

News Source: ComputerWeekly
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Many rejoiced late last night when Sony posted the 2.40 firmware update for the Playstation 3. The 2.40 brought a number of improvements to the platform including in-game XMB accesses, a new Trophy system similar in concept to Xbox 360 Achievements, and the ability for gamers to use music playlists within games (provided that the game developers provides a patch to support the feature).

Shortly after the update went live, many users began reporting problems with the update. A thread over at the official Playstation 3 forums is currently up to 61-pages and is filled with a number of irate owners.

According to Kotaku, the update is causing some controllers to malfunction, and in many cases, it bricks the system altogether. All Playstation 3 systems — 20GB, 40GB, 60GB, and 80GB — have an equal chance in having problems with the update, so no one is safe.

News Source: DailyTech
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