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Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Facebook to Debut Music Service in September

According to Mashable, Facebok will join hands with MOG, Rdio, and Spotify to create a Facebook music service that will be announced at the F8 Facebook developer conference in September. Facebook and its partners, however, downplayed any relationship. Spotify also declined to confirm the report. Spotify already offers to share music with friends via Facebook, including playlists, as does Rdio and MOG. All three services provide a free tier, then charge additional fees for unlimited streaming and mobile playback.

It’s also believed that Facebook will use a Music Dashboard that will work with a persistent play/pause music control button that will appear at the bottom of the screen near the Facebook Chat icon. The Music Dashboard will keep a summary of all the songs you listened to on each service and fill flag up any songs that your friends have recently listened to.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Steve Jobs resigns from Apple

Apple's leader Steve Jobs turned in his resignation on Wednesday as Apple's chief executive. This leaves many wondering whether Apple can continue its success under new leadership.

The shock among Apple fans was widespread even though it was well known that Jobs had serious health problems. Jobs' resignation may have been a surprise, but it wasn't unexpected. Jobs had taken a leave of absence.in 2009 a liver transplant and in the beginning of the year he again stepped away for medical reasons. Jobs did not give a specific reason for resigning but it appears to be health related. Jobs recommended that Apple's board of directors name Tim Cook as the next chief executive. Cook has taken over the leadership role at Apple several times while Jobs was on medical leave.

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, and was then kicked out of the company in 1985. He then returned in 1996, when the firm was in serious financial trouble. Soon after that things started picking up and out came the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Windows 8 will support USB 3.0 and 10 billion devices

The upcoming Windows 8 OS will fully support USB 3.0 and still retain backwards compatibility with the 10 billion existing USB 1.0 and 2.0 devices still in use. USB 3.0 will offer a 10x speed increase over USB 2.0 (up to 5 Gbit/s). USB 3.0 will provide 80% more power than USB 2.0 and allow for faster charging and remove the need for those “Y" cables used by external drives and other high power devices.

As of now there are no chipsets with USB 3.0 controllers onboard and the manufacturer of the motherboard has to use a third party chipset to enable USB 3.0 support. By 2015 all PCs sold will come with USB 3.0 ports, and there will be over 2 billion USB 3.0 devices sold that year as well. Microsoft is promising that Windows 8 will have robust USB 3.0 support.

Other work done to prepare for USB 3.0 included extensive hardware testing and creating a custom tool called MUTT (USB Test Tool) which can test 1000 USB devices for various compatibility issues.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Microsoft To Reveal Windows 8 Details

Microsoft will announce new details about the architecture and capabilities of its upcoming Windows 8 operating system in the coming weeks to prepare developers and users for what it calls the most significant overhaul of its OS since it released Windows 95.

"Windows 8 re-imagines Windows for a new generation of computing devices, and will be the very best operating system for hundreds of millions of PCs, new and old, used by well over a billion people globally" said Windows division president Steven Sinofksy. Microsoft also said that, with the introduction of Windows 8, for the first time the OS will run on x86 chips from Intel and AMD and also on ARM's system on a chip architecture for tablets and smartphones.

Developers will get their first hands-on look at the OS next month at Microsoft's BUILD conference in Anaheim, CA.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Internet Explorer 9 may do the best job of defending against malware links

According to research firm NSS Labs, IE 9 offers Web users the best protection against malware With its new Application Reputation feature. NSS found that IE9 blocks malicious URLs more than 99% of the time. Microsoft continues to improve their IE malware protection in IE9 through its SmartScreen Filter technology and with the addition of SmartScreen Application Reputation technology," NSS reported.

The NSS study refers to malware URLs as links that entice users to download a malicious payload or visit a site known to host malware links. "With a unique URL blocking score of 99.9 percent and over time protection rating of 99.2 percent, Internet Explorer 9 was by far the best at protecting against socially engineered malware," they said. The over time protection rate for Google Chrome, for example, was 13.2 percent, while for Firefox 4 and Safari 5 it was 7.6 percent and for Opera 11, 6.1 percent.

Sophos's Chet Wisniewski challenged the claims made by NSS "Because IE9's unable to block exploits of such software as Adobe Reader and Flash, Apple's iTunes or Oracle 's Java, Microsoft's data doesn't show the real picture,".

NSS explained that social engineering malware remains the most common security threat facing Internet users today, claiming one third of Internet users as victims. Neither Microsoft nor any other browser maker sponsored the report.

Sunday, August 07, 2011

The First Website Was Published 20 Years Ago Today

On August 6, 1991, 36 year old physicist Tim Berners-Lee published the first website at a CERN facility in the Swiss Alps. The address of this website was Info.cern.ch as well as the first web server. Keep in mind that this is the birth of the web, not the Internet itself.

The first web page on this website was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html and focused on information regarding the WWW project. On this site you could learn about hypertext, details for creating webpages and learn how to search the Web for information. Since the only people who had a web browser were Berners-Lee and his colleagues, it didn't help other potential web users. Eventually installations of web servers and the use of web browsers spread and 1993 the Mosaic browser was released. Over the next several years, people started using browsers such asMosaic, Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer to start exploring all of the new sites being created.

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (often referred to as “W3C”) at MIT in order to create standards for the web to ensure that different websites would all work the same way.

Monday, August 01, 2011

Adobe Edge Tool May Replace Flash With HTML5

Adobe has just released a preview version of its new HTML5 development tool called Adobe Edge. Edge will allow Web developers to create animated graphics using HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript. Some analysts are saying that Adobe realizes that the web is moving away from Flash and it is instead focusing on open standard HTML5 and its many sub standards which can create the same type of content that Flash can. Edge also has a definite focus on the mobile Web the fastest growing segment of Internet use. Adobe says Edge is not a replacement for Flash but it's likely to become a popular alternative to Flash. The Edge preview product now is available at the Adobe Labs site.