News

Intel regularly tweaks its price list with nary a word to the masses, but the Tech Report caught chipzilla red-handed this time. The site reports that Intel has lowered prices on four desktop and two mobile processors. Looking at the latest price sheet (PDF), Intel cut 15% off its 3.2GHz i3-550, putting it at $117. That’s identical to the 3.06GHz i3-540 and only $4 more than the 2.93GHz i3-530 — the company’s cheapest i3 desktop offering. ...

Just last week NVidia distributed a beta version of their Forceware drivers 260.89. The main feature was support for their recently launched GeForce GT 430, and although a few other improvements were mentioned there was nothing really outstanding. This time around the company offers the final release of these drivers with pretty much the same improvements, plus support for playing back Blu-ray 3D discs when connecting your GPU to a 3D TV through HDMI. ...

While NVidia’s big news may have been its upcoming budget-range GeForce GT 430 1GB cards which leaked out earlier this month, it seems that the company has been hiding another secret: the GeForce GT 440 range. Quietly detailed on the company’s website, the NVidia GeForce GT 440 range of cards is designed to offer OEMs a DirectX 11-compatible card for adding in to their mid-range machines. According to the reference specifications, the GT440 cards feature a 594MHz graphics clock, 1,189MHz processor clock, and either 800 or 900MHz memory clock, along with 144 CUDA cores. Interestingly, NVidia will be offering at least two different models: a budget-friendly version featuring 1.5GB of GDDR3, or a high-end model with 3GB of GDDR3. ...

The good news is that overseas hackers apparently did not change the grades of more then 100 thousand University of North Florida students when they broke into the computer system in September. The bad news is that personal information like names and social security numbers for those students may now be in the hands of those hackers. The FBI is investigating the attack, which was discovered by the university in a routine check of the server. According to University officials, the hacker had access to the system between September 24th and September 29th, but the University did not say when the breach was discovered. The Florida Times-Union newspaper said the university learned of the attack in September but did not notify potential victims because they were still investigating ...

Google found a nice way to wish you Happy Birthday. If you visit Google’s homepage when you are signed in and it’s your birthday, you’ll see a special doodle that links to your Google profile. When you go to your profile, you’ll find colorful confetti and a Happy Birthday message, but that’s not new. “Because doodles are such a fun part of the search experience, we thought we’d share a fun little way Google will help celebrate your birthday. When you include your date of birth on your Google profile, you may notice a special treat on the Google homepage on your birthday (be sure to sign in). Click on the doodle for another birthday surprise,” informs the Google blog. ...

If you needed more proof that texting is on the rise, here’s a stat for you: the average teenager sends over 3,000 texts per month. That’s more than six texts per waking hour. According to a new study from Nielsen, our society has gone mad with texting, data usage and app downloads. Nielsen analyzed the mobile data habits of over 60,000 mobile subscribers and surveyed over 3,000 teens during April, May and June of this year. The numbers they came up with are astounding. ...

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced on their blog that the site will soon be offering new features and controls. The features include New Facebook Groups, a Dashboard for Applications, and the ability to Download Your Information. #1 — Why the “new” Groups? According to Zuckerberg, people frequently tell them: “I’d share this thing, but I don’t want to bother 250 people. Or my grandmother. Or my boss.” Now we thought that’s what Friends Lists are for… but then, even Zuckerberg has admitted that Friends Lists are too difficult for most people to effectively manage. So this “completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups” is really mostly the same old Groups that we’ve been using since early 2009, with some PR spin. ...

Some people didn’t like his comments about downloading… Two of Gene Simmons’ official sites were shut down after hacker attacks by a group called Anonymous, associated with the 4chan.org forum. The attacks were in response to comments by Simmons about how the music industry should have been tougher with illegal downloaders. Both SimmonsRecords.com and GeneSimmons.com were taken offline briefly due to the attacks. Simmons had made the comment, “The music industry was asleep at the wheel, and didn’t have the balls to sue every fresh-faced, freckle-faced college kid who downloaded material. And so now we’re left with hundreds of thousands of people without jobs. There’s no industry.” ...

Very soon, the first build of Opera 11 will be released, and with it will come the long-awaited support for browser extensions. Yesterday at Up North Web, Opera Software’s global press day in Oslo, Norway, it was confirmed that Opera 11 will support browser extensions, the plug-ins that users can incrementally add to their browser to customize the experience. All of Opera’s competitors: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and now Safari, each offer their own extension architecture already. ...

Microsoft and Facebook Wednesday unveiled some new search tools for Bing which integrate data from a user’s circle of friends into Bing’s search results. In the Bing blog on Wednesday, Microsoft Senior Vice President of online services Satya Nadella said 50% of users consider their friends’ opinions when making a decision online. Bing is trying to capitalize on this by incorporating the “likes” of a user’s friend list into search results. ...

Firefox’s JavaScript engine, Spidermonkey (including the Tracemonkey and Jaegermonkey JITs) is now faster than Webkit’s JSCore on both Sunspider and V8. Great work, team! Also, on the Sunspider benchmark, Mozilla is only about 1/100th of a second behind Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine (about 3.5%). Oh, and there’s Kraken, where we’re still solidly in the lead.

Welcome to our first release of the new Mozilla about:support add-on. about:support was developed by Siddharth Agarwal with design input from Bryan Clark and testing by Roland Tanglao about:support is based on Firefox’s about:support code, hence the name. It has been modified for Thunderbird to include email account specific information along with the normal preferences and add-ons. You can access about:support from the Help Menu: Help -> Troubleshooting Information which opens a new tab containing all your troubleshooting information including the Thunderbird specific IMAP, POP, and SMTP settings. The account information is often difficult for users to gather and deliver during the Thunderbird troubleshooting process. With the about:support add-on, the troubleshooting information is presented to the user such that it can be copied to the clipboard and pasted into a Thunderbird support forum like Get Satisfaction or emailed directly to others. With your help, Mozilla is hoping to get this add-on built directly into future versions of Thunderbird so please try it out and leave your feedback. See the about:support project page for links concerning issues, feedback, and ideas. ...

Windows Phone 7 officially launched 11Oct at a press event in NYC Monday morning. You can check out more here – http://www.windowsphone7.com By the way, if you have any doubts about the platform or it’s responsiveness, you should really watch this video here – http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsphone/videoGallery.aspx?contentID=wp7_unveil03&WT.z_convert=Share Seriously, watch the video. The responsiveness of the device is just flat out amazing. No lag whatsoever. If you’ve been a Windows Mobile user, this is a VERY, VERY good thing to see. I currently have a HTC Touch Pro 2 and the delay is soooo irritating. It’s even faster than my ZuneHD. Wait until you see the Bing Maps responsiveness, or the Bing Search (using Voice) feature. ...

As predicted Adobe AIR for Android is now available in the Android Market. Go get it.

Accessing Facebook from a public computer or Internet cafe can now be done more securely. Moving to enhance online security, Facebook on Tuesday said that it will soon offer users the ability to receive one-time passwords on their mobile phones and that it has already enabled the ability to sign out of Facebook remotely. “We’re launching one-time passwords to make it safer to use public computers in places like hotels, cafes or airports,” said Facebook product manager Jake Brill in a blog post. “If you have any concerns about security of the computer you’re using while accessing Facebook, we can text you a one-time password to use instead of your regular password.” ...