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Microsoft says Google is a bad habit, and it’s hard for people to break it in order to try alternatives, such as the company’s search engine, Bing. “It’s a hard thing. Habits die hard,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President of Online Audience Business, said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, according to PC World. Mehdi is referring to users’ tendency to use Google for online searches without a second thought. It’s almost second nature to them. Many people even head to Google as their first webpage when they’re testing to see if they have an Internet connection. ...

Facebook has announced a new product that will compete directly with the e-mail services provided by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and AOL. Facebook believes traditional e-mail is too slow and cumbersome; it needs be brought into the modern world of messaging. The site has thus launched Facebook Messages, which merges texts, online chats, and e-mails into one central hub. Users see all of them in their Social Inbox and can reply in any way they want. The social networking giant says this product is the biggest it has worked on to date. ...

PC Magazine: The Beatles have finally given iTunes a ticket to ride, allowing their iconic music to be added to Apple’s catalog. But while the Fab Four might be the most notable iTunes holdout, they certainly aren’t the last. A dwindling number of artists are still resistant to joining Apple’s music download service. Searches on iTunes for AC/DC, Kid Rock, Tool, Garth Brooks, and Def Leppard will return disappointing results: karaoke and cover tracks, not material from the artists themselves. Reasons for non-compliance with Apple vary. ...

Thousands of female Facebook users had their accounts inexplicably disabled today. They did not violate Facebook’s terms of use but nevertheless, they are seeing messages claiming their accounts are “inauthentic,” according to Me & Her. Facebook has confirmed the issue and is asking users to scan and upload a copy of a valid driver’s license in order to reactivate their accounts. The mass-deactivations are a small percentage of Facebook’s total subscriber base, but the number of users affected is easily in the thousands. ...

THE INTERNET SEARCH OUTFIT without a search engine, Yahoo has announced a package of products that it hopes will make it more relevant again. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Yahoo showed off a host of products that it claimed would deliver to consumers a more “personally relevant Web experience with new social and local features”. You guessed it, more social networking and more experiences than you can poke a stick at. ...

We’ve all heard of graphics card makers optimizing their drivers for various benchmarks—some of you might recall the Quack story as one of the earlier examples. I think this might be the first time I’ve heard about the same thing happening in the world of web browsers, though. Believe it or not, Digitizor says a Mozilla engineer has found evidence that Internet Explorer 9 is “cheating” in the popular SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. ...

Todd Bishop, TechFlash: Not sure if this will factor into anyone’s purchasing decisions, but it looks like Windows Phone 7 is the smartphone for you — at least if you have a habit of leaving your smartphone unattended on a flaming grill. EZ Grill, a Bellevue-based disposable BBQ company, worked with Seattle-based social media agency Banyan Branch to pit a new HTC Surround, running the Microsoft operating system, against the Android G2 and iPhone 4 in a test of endurance on the grill. As you can see in the video above, Windows Phone won easily. ...

This Posters shows, how many floppies are enough for current softwares. Result (Approximate) 46 disk for iTunes 8.02, 358 disk for Adobe Photoshop CS4, 1760 disk for the Sims 3, 12 disk for Firefox 3, See the main story here: http://www.behance.net/gallery/3_5-inch-poster-set/164212

Righard Zwienenberg from Norman Security Center Blog posted something interesting, Thanks to Mr. Fagerlid for Sharing: There is some commotion in The Netherlands. Telecom/ISP provider UPC is providing its customers with the Thomson TWG870U router, a Docsis 3.0 router. On the tweakers.net forum (Dutch language), a user discovered that the router, which is also providing Wireless Access, has a second hidden wireless network. Problem here is that: ...

Mashable: We know that a number of Android tablets are coming in the next couple of months. But will these devices be able to compete with Apple’s iPad, which is currently dominating the market? According to NVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, not only the new Android tablets will be competitive, they’ll be better than the iPad in many areas. Many of the upcoming tablets will be using NVidia’s dual-core Tegra 2 processor, which will “give you the benefit of higher performance and much, much better multitasking and better graphics”, Huang said in an interview with Cnet. ...