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.

The July 11 ship date had been set by Apple during Steve Jobs’ Worldwide Developers Conference keynote last month, but the exact time of the release was still up in the air. AT&T made the announcement amid detailing the pricing plans for the iPhone 3G.

“We can’t wait to offer iPhone 3G to our customers, and we want to make sure the buying process is as easy as possible,” Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T’s wireless unit, said in the press release announcing the 8 a.m. launch.

News Source: InfoWorld
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Dell Touts Better Blade Management

Firms using Dell PowerEdge M-Series blade server systems now have a simple way of managing their blades, using software stored on a Secure Digital (SD) card.

The Dell FlexAddress SD card can hold a set of Ethernet MAC addresses and Fibre Channel worldwide names for Dell’s blades, giving IT managers the ability to manage network and storage over the whole chassis, rather than just individual blades.

Dell’s EMEA public sector enterprise marketing manager Hugh Jenkins said, ” FlexAddress can also be used across a range of the multi-vendor, multi-media switches that Dell supports in the M-Series – these include a range of Cisco gigabit and ten gigabit switches, our PowerConnect switch range, and Brocade Fibre Channel switches.”

News Source: IT Week
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Office Subscription Service Ready To Go

If you are looking for “Albany,” you might want to try heading to Circuit City.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced that Circuit City will be the first to offer a new Office subscription service, first known by its Albany code name and now dubbed Equipt.

The idea behind the subscription service is to convert more new PC buyers into Office buyers. It plays on the fact that although most people don’t buy Office at the same time as a computer, many do purchase a security software subscription.

News Source: C|Net News
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Microsoft’s XP SP3 Patch Fixes Anti-Virus Glitch

Microsoft issued a hotfix for Windows XP Service Pack 3 last week that it says “could resolve” a Windows registry corruption problem associated with third-party security software. The problem was first discovered just over a month ago, and it notably affected users of Symantec’s Norton Antivirus suite of products.

Some users who installed XP SP3 reported seeing garbled system entries that cluttered the Windows registry. The corruption in the registry led to problems such as lost Internet and wireless connections, along with uninitiated restarts caused by sporadic registry subkeys.

News Source: ENT News
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Microsoft Internet Explorer Vulnerability Warning Issued

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 beta 1 appear to contain a security flaw that could subject users who visit a malicious Web site or open a malicious e-mail message to arbitrary code.

U.S. CERT has published a vulnerability note indicating Internet Explorer doesn’t handle document frames securely.

Document frames can be used to subdivide Web pages such that the content associated with each division comes from a different server or domain. These “iframes,” or inline frames, often are used for serving ads, which typically come from a different domain than content that appears on the same Web page.

News Source: InformationWeek
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Blockbuster Calls The Circuit City Merger Off, Asks For Class Ring Back

It looks like the potential lovefest that might have been the Blockbuster and Circuit City mashup has drifted away as quickly as it appeared. “Based on market conditions and the completion of our initial due diligence process, we have determined that it is not in the best interest of Blockbuster’s shareholders to proceed with an acquisition of Circuit City,” said Jim Keyes, head-pimp at B-Buster. We can’t be sure what the result was with Circuit City shareholders or employees, but we’re willing to bet it didn’t look anything like that Best Buy rap video.

News Source: Engadget
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Texas PC Repair Now Requires PI License

rom its Texas Rangers to its enthusiastic take on the death penalty, the Lone Star State has long been known for its aggressive stance on law enforcement. Thanks to a strange new law, it’s a sting that may soon be felt by a number of the state’s computer-repair people.

A recently passed law requires that Texas computer-repair technicians have a private-investigator license, according to a story posted by a Dallas-Fort Worth CW affiliate.

In order to obtain said license, technicians must receive a criminal justice degree or participate in a three-year apprenticeship. Those shops that refuse to participate will be forced to shut down. Violators of the new law can be hit with a $4,000 dollar fine and up to a year in jail, penalties that apply to customers who seek out their services.

News Source: Gearlog
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Q&A: Xandros’ CEO Andreas Typaldos

Yesterday we reported on rumours that Xandros would acquire Linspire. The official press release won’t go out until tomorrow, but Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos answered a set of questions about the acquisition, so read on for an inside scoop on the Xandros-Linspire acquisition and what it means for both companies.

News Source: OSNews
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Campus Copyright Battle Moves To Textbook Torrents

The RIAA’s extensive campaign against filesharing has drawn in a lot of individuals, but college campuses have remained a major target of the content owners’ legal threats. It’s pretty clear that there’s significant expertise with filesharing on college campuses, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this expertise has been put to use with other copyrighted materials. Textbook companies are getting worried about the sharing of their bread-and-butter online, and have started a campaign designed to block the sharing at its source.

Textbook Torrents (catchphrase: “because you can’t torrent beer”) is one of the sites mentioned in a report by The Chronicle of Higher Education, and its administrators clearly view themselves as providing a public good. The site’s rules page exhorts users who’ve saved money by downloading texts there to go out and spend the equivalent money on a scanner. “Scan as many of your other textbooks as you can, and put them up here for others to benefit from,” it reads. “There aren’t very many scanned texts out there, so let’s change that.” Anyone who manages to find all their books through the site are encouraged to go out and buy a text simply to contribute it to TT’s collection.

News Source: Ars Technica
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The State Of MMS Messaging On The iPhone

With the iPhone 3G just two weeks away, we wonder what’s going on with the support – or better said, the lack of support - for MMS messaging, a popular multimedia service widely used to exchange pictures between users of MMS-enabled mobile phones. The first iPhone lacked this capability and it seems the iPhone 2.0 update won’t bring MMS after all. But MMS will come to the iPhone in future updates and users of jailbroken iPhones already have a third-party MMS application.

Apple is mum on the matter. Its executives didn’t mention MMS at Apple’s recent developers conference in San Francisco. It’s unclear why this popular feature seems to be low on Apple’s priority list, especially since there aren’t any technical hurdles that would prevent the company from bringing it to the iPhone. One thing is certain: Apple will bring MMS to the iPhone, probably in future software updates. In the meantime, users of jailbroken iPhones can use unofficial application to send and receive picture MMS messages.

News Source: TG Daily
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