Vendors now see browsers as a development platform, despite challenges.

The browser wars are over, and now Microsoft Corp., Mozilla Corp. and other vendors plan to focus on positioning the browser as a development platform. That was the consensus yesterday of a panel of representatives here at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo who help develop Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and the Google Reader.

Instead of trying to trump one another by adding features in point releases, the companies that developed these browsers are instead intent on advancing their use as platforms for a new generation of rich Internet applications and for tackling the hurdles that will come along with that shift in strategy, the panel said.

"We're moving from putting up [on the Web], 'Here are me, my mom and my cat' to 'Here is a rich application,'" said Charles McCathieNevile, chief standards officer at Opera Software ASA. "As the Web itself grew, you had these little communities building these cool things. The explosion was enough that these little communities were running into each other. As the Web has become a really big platform to build on were seeing a lot of sharing that wasn't happening before."

View: ComputerWorld

Use Google Apps for work? We've found the dial-in number and passcode for a business's event can be easily found by searching with Google.

It's not clear what gets discussed during McKinsey & Co.'s weekly internal communication meeting, but the dial-in number and passcode for the event can be easily found by searching with Google.

The data is out there thanks to the Search Google Calendar a feature added to Google's Web-based calendar service last November. Google bills it as a cool way to discover interesting events, but a few quick searches show that it can also be used to turn up sensitive corporate information that was inadvertently made public using Google Calendar.

Launched last year as part of Google's effort to develop a series of Web-based productivity applications, Google Calendar gives users the choice of keeping calendar entries private or publishing them for the world to see, but some Google Calendar users appear to be sharing their calendar information without realizing it. The McKinsey dial-in information, for example, was posted by a single person who had shared a number of calendar events including project status meetings and call in numbers for the company's "McKwiki Weekly," project.

View: PC World

Fruits of the Adobe-Macromedia merger appear today.

Adobe Systems’ long-awaited Creative Suite 3 is hitting streets today, adding the CS3 moniker to popular creative applications – from both Adobe and the former Macromedia – Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Contribute. These new Adobe CS3 applications are available as Universal applications for both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs and support both Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Web professionals can import native Photoshop and Illustrator files directly into Flash and Fireworks with full fidelity, which Adobe says is a first for its software. Furthermore, Creative Suite 3 is optimized for Intel-based Macintosh systems, something that was a sticking point for the previous version.

Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, and Web Standard are immediately available to customers in the North America. Estimated street price for the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium edition is $1799, $1199 for Creative Suite 3 Design Standard edition, $1599 for Creative Suite 3 Web Premium and $999 for Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Standard.

Source: DailyTech

Intel demonstrated on Tuesday a memory chip based on a concept it has been tinkering with for nearly 30 years.

Code-named Alverston, the chip is a phase change memory device. Intel CTO Justin Rattner demonstrated a 128-bit sample of Alverstone at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing and will start sending samples to customers in the first half of this year. Intel is working on the project with ST Microelectronics.

The material is similar to the material that makes up CD-ROM discs. A chip is divided up into tiny bits. When heated, the material inside a single bit turns crystalline. A light can then be shone on the bit, and the reflected image is registered as a "1" in the binary system of computers.

When reheated and cooled, the same bit becomes amorphous and becomes a "0." The amorphous "0" and crystalline "1" bits store data.

View: C|net News

Microchip maker says circuitry will also be 30 percent thinner.

Intel Corp. said a new line of computer processors due out later this year will be about 40 percent faster than current chips when running computer games, videos and other heavy workloads.

The world’s biggest microchip maker, which powers about 75 percent of computers, said the new Penryn processors will have the same basic design as current ones, but the circuitry will be 30 percent thinner — just 45 millionths of a millimeter wide.

“In high-performance computing and bandwidth intensive applications ... there will be up to a whopping 45 percent performance increase,” said Patrick Gelsinger, the general manager for Intel’s digital enterprise group.

View: MSNBC

Microsoft is preparing to launch Windows Live Hotmail in the United States by next month, although customers in India and Belgium will begin seeing the updates later this week, the company is expected to announce Tuesday. Other Windows Live product updates are also likely.

Various sources tell BetaNews that the upgrades won't come automatically, but rather in a gradual process over the next several weeks. Testers in France are currently receiving e-mails saying they will receive the update in several days, with a similar e-mail circulating to UK users.

Other smaller markets are likely to receive the updated interface before the US market as the logistics of migrating those accounts are a lot simpler, one source said.

Details of the US launch are scarce, as Microsoft is keeping much tighter wraps on announcements; however, it is said that the company is targeting the first or second week of May to roll out the product here.

Windows Live Hotmail will offer several enhancements over the current user interface and is built upon Microsoft's AJAX platform. It includes right click menus, a paneled interface, and updated search bar. The UI is very similar to that of Outlook, the company's desktop e-mail application.

Source: BetaNews

Americans who sell items through Internet auction sites could be in for an unpleasant surprise at tax time next year, thanks to an IRS proposal designed to identify taxpayers who don't report income from those sales.

The U.S. Treasury Department wants Congress to force auction sites like eBay, Amazon.com and uBid.com to turn over the identities and Social Security numbers of a large portion of their users to the IRS--so tax collectors know how much each person made through online selling.

The effort is part of a larger plan, which enjoys enthusiastic support from both Democrats and Republicans, to close what's known as the "tax gap." It's a broad term that covers Americans who don't file tax returns or those who underreport their income, and the IRS believes it to total around $345 billion for the 2001 tax year.

But the proposal is likely to encounter stiff opposition from Internet auction aficionados, free-market advocates and the auction Web sites themselves, not all of which are large enough to be able to comply with the rules without financial hardship.

View: C|net News

Intel today announced new details of its forthcoming Santa Rosa PC platform, including a significant revision of the Core 2 Duo chip.

"We call this processor Core 2 Duo but really it's Core 2 Duo on steroids. This microprocessor is going to be more powerful than the previous generation," said Intel's mobility chief, Mooly Eden.

The new chips will be able to overclock one of the cores if the other core is not being used.

"The idea is the following," explained Eden. "If you are running a single threaded application, one of the cores can go to sleep, and the left over power can be used by the other core - we give it a turbo boost; the ability to run faster than it used to.

"This is not overclocking. Overclocking is when you take a chip and increase its clock speed and run it out of spec. This is not out of spec. Here, it is within the spec of the dual-cores, we just identify when one core is not using the headroom and we give it to the other core.

View: APC Magazine

Have you been itching to enjoy your media content on Firefox? The Windows Media Player team put a lot of work into evolving media playback on Windows Vista through the new Media Foundation pipeline, and has also been actively monitoring feedback on WMP and playback in general. While commentary has been mainly positive for Web playback through IE, we've noticed that there's still work to be done to make Firefox users able to enjoy their media content on Windows.

We couldn't respond as quickly as we would have liked to (we had to get Windows Vista out the door), but now that it's shipped, the team has moved its attention to getting Firefox users up and running. This week we are happy to say that we have a new plug-un for Firefox that makes WMP work once again -- and even better than it did before!

It's easy to get the new Firefox plug-in -- if you navigate to a Web page today that has the embedded WMP ActiveX control, Firefox will automatically grab the new plug-in for you to install and you will once again be able to enjoy your media content

Download: Media Player Plugin for Firefox

Source: Windows Vista Blog

Apple Corps, which represents The Beatles, has settled a £30m royalty dispute with EMI Group, removing the final obstacle preventing the band's music from going online.

Apple Corps is owned by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison.

The company began legal proceedings against EMI in December 2005, claiming that EMI owed more than £30m in unpaid royalties from sales between 1994 and 1999.

Details of the settlement have not been disclosed, but EMI and Apple Corps said in a joint statement that they "settled last month on mutually acceptable terms".

Apple Corps can now negotiate a new royalties deal with EMI to cater for online music downloads via sites like iTunes.

View: Vnunet