Michael Jackson’s Death Caused News Sites Collapsed
The death of the King of Pop has caused several news sites to slow down due to the amount of traffic related to the news on Thursday. The availability for the news sites from ABC, CBS, AOL, MSNBC, NBC, the San Francisco Chronicle, Yahoo News and the LA Times dropped to almost 10 percent when the news came out.
Good bye Micheal Jackson. He died unexpectedly at age 50 from a heart attack in Los Angeles.
Source: News Sites Falter as Traffic Spikes After Jackson’s Death
China Go Ahead With Internet Filter Plan
From July 1, all computers sold in China would be required to have pornography filtering software “Green Dam Youth Escort” pre-installed. The filter will also block political content such as those from cult group Falun Gong.
Source: China sticks to Internet filter plan
HP TouchSmart Web Connected Printer
Hewlett-Packard revealed an Internet connected TouchSmart Printer that lets people print from Web sites without having to turn on a PC. HP also launched HP Apps Studio, a web site for downloading future applications for the printer. The printer can be connected via wire or wireless and it can connect to your devices through Bluetooth.
Firefox 3.5 RC Out
Mozilla has now made available Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate for users to download and try. The final version will be out at the end of June.
- This release candidate is now available in more than 70 languages – get your local version.
- Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
- Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
- Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
- Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
- Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.
Download: Firefox 3.5 RC
Opera Unite Browser Server
Opera Unite is an app that turns any computer or device running Opera into a Web server. From Opera blog: With Opera Unite, everyday non-technical users can serve and share content and services directly from their own computers in the form of intuitive applications.
Unite adds a tab to Opera’s widget sidebar, and comes with six apps to share your content: File Sharing, a Fridge, Media Player, Photo Sharing, The Lounge, and Web server.
Microsoft Windows 7 E Will Not Have IE 8 In Europe
Microsoft will ship Windows 7E which has no preinstall Internet Explorer 8 in Europe. This is a reaction to an antitrust investigation by the EU regarding Microsoft’s bundling of software. The irony here is that IE is loosing market share to Firefox, Safari and Google.
Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook
Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook is designed to integrate Microsoft Outlook with Google Apps Premier and Education editions.
From Google Blog: Key features include:
- Email, calendar, and contacts synchronization. For email, the plug-in uses the offline Gmail protocol, which is much faster than IMAP or other methods.
- Free/Busy lookup and Global Address List functionality, which makes it easy to schedule meetings with your colleagues, regardless of whether they use Outlook’s calendar or Google Calendar.
- A simple, two-click data migration tool which allows employees to easily copy existing data from Exchange or Outlook into Google Apps.
Web-based applications offerred by Google will now work with Microsoft’s email, contacts, and calendars.
Apple Announced Safari 4
Apple has finally bring Safari 4 out of beta and announcing it at WWDC 2009. The version 4 has lots of features and the most promising is Top Sites which show thumbnails of your favourite website rendered on a grid. Other new features are Full History Search and Cover Flow, and support for modern web standards like HTML 5 and advanced CSS Effects.
Apple claims that Safari 4 is built on the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript nearly eight times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages more than three times faster than IE 8 and three times faster than Firefox 3.
Press Release: Apple Releases Safari 4—The World’s Fastest & Most Innovative Browser
Google Mentor Rajeev Motwani Found Fead In Swimming Pool
Rajeev Motwani, 47, a Stanford University professor and mentor to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was discovered dead in his swimming pool. The caused of his dead is unclear as a non swimmer, he could have fallen in the pool by accident. At this stage, more will be revealed after the autopsy.
Google Sergey wrote on his blog, “Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it. When Larry and I began to work together on the research that would lead to Google, Rajeev was there to support us and guide us through challenges, both technical and organisational.”
Source: Google founders’ mentor found dead in swimming pool
Google Celebrates 25th Anniversary Tetris
It is not easy to read the Google logo when it is constructed with blocks representing a Tetris game. Google is celebrating the 25th anniversary of Tetris.
