TechBlog

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

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. ...

BetaNews: Mozilla Wednesday released a significant update to the beta of its Firefox 4 browser. The update adds a new JavaScript JIT compiler, going by the name of JägerMonkey, and improves the browser’s support for hardware acceleration, OpenType fonts, and WebGL 3D graphics (the technology used to create an HTML5 version of Quake II back in April.) Additionally, the latest beta includes a stable add-ons API, so developers can finally update their add-ons to Firefox 4. ...

Mashable: If you live for data, slave over spreadsheets and constantly find yourself sifting through endless rows and columns of facts and figures, Google’s got a lovely new product just for you — and it’s free and open-source, too. Google Refine is a project born of Freebase Gridworks, a data-cleaning tool Google acquired when it bought Metaweb during the summer. Google has since renamed Gridworks and relaunched it as Refine. ...