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New Year Delayed by Extra Second

Revellers ushering in 2009 will have to literally wait a second this New Year's Eve. The world's official timekeepers are adding a "leap second" to the final day of the year to help match clocks to the Earth's spin.

Windows 7 beta leaks to Internet

Pirated copies of a Windows 7 build pegged by many as the beta Microsoft Corp. will release next month have leaked to the Internet, according to searches at several BitTorrent sites today.

World Computer ownership

http://media.economist.com/images/rankings/1509-Computers.jpg

Merry Christmas to All My Readers!

To all my readers who celebrate Christmas, a very Merry Christmas to you, hopefully you will be enjoying this time of the year with your family and friends. All the best!

Notebook shipments past desktops

WORLDWIDE SHIPMENTS of notebook PCs overtook desktops during the third quarter for the first time, industry markets tracking firm Isuppli reported Tuesday.

China set to change punishment levels for hacking

Chinese hackers could face steep fines and even prison under new reforms.

World of Warcraft Reaches New Milestone, 11.5 Million Players are Now Playing

Blizzard Entertainment today announced that World of Warcraft, its award-winning subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game, is now played by more than 11.5 million subscribers worldwide. This new high was reached following the November 13 release of the game's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. Within its first 24 hours of availability, Wrath of the Lich King sold more than 2.8 million copies, making it the fastest-selling PC game of all time. In addition to winning a number of editor's choice awards from major gaming publications, the expansion has now gone on to sell more than 4 million copies in its first month, setting a new record for monthly PC-game sales. Both sales records were previously held by World of Warcraft's first expansion, The Burning Crusade.

Latest search numbers not good for Microsoft

ComScore published its November search-query share numbers on December 19. The news wasn�t good for Live Search.

XP Death sentence postponed

MICROSOFT has told its system builder partners that they will be allowed to continue to sell XP after the January 31, 2009 cut-off date.

Lenovo Announces Dual-Screen Mobile Workstation - ThinkPad W700ds

Lenovo this weekend officially announced its ThinkPad W700ds (ds stands for dual-screen), a mobile workstation with two fully functional LCD displays. Inside and round the back of the main 17-inch display is housed a second one, 10.6-inch in diagonal that can also be tilted up to 30 degrees like a car's rearview mirror. The secondary WXGA display (768x1280), allows users to own a workstation notebook with dual-monitor support for the first time. Wes Williams, product marketing manager for ThinkPads, said: "People that use high-end computers, whether they are professional photographers or work in other fields, all use two displays at their desktops ... What we were trying to do in building a mobile workstation is give them the same experience. Not only do you need a great display, great graphics, great processor and RAID hard drive with a workstation, but it is hard going back to a single display mode." The Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds is said to make its first appearance at CES, starting January 5, 2008. Among the other cool features that will be integrated inside the W700ds are the latest Intel Core 2 Quad 45nm processors, NVIDIA Quadro mobile graphics, up to 8GB of DDR3 memory, and a pair of hard drive/solid-state drive bays for up to 960GB of storage. The W700ds' starting price is expected to be $3,600 upon availability.

Abit to shutdown on December 31

Abit, one of the most popular brand names with motherboards, will be formally closing shop on December 31. A popular brand among computer enthusiasts, Abit has a history of churning out some of the best high-end motherboards. Bad corporate governance, along with poor decision-making at the management level, set Abit on a path towards its slow and painful end. Revived by the United Scientific Industrial (USI) in 2006, the company showed some resurgence, it also planned to diversify into peripherals such as digital photo frames, speakers, etc., alongside its desktop motherboards lineup, but evidently it didn't help the company. Post Dec. 31, the company will continue to honour its warranty and RMA commitments for up to three years. Farewell Abit!

Toshiba Launches Industry's First 512GB Solid State Drives Using 43nm MLC NAND

Toshiba Corporation today announced the expansion of their line up of NAND-flash-based solid state drives (SSD) with the industry's first 2.5-inch 512-gigabyte (GB) SSD and a broad family of fast read/write SSDs based on 43 nanometer (nm) Multi-Level Cell NAND. The new drives provide a high level of performance and endurance for use in notebook computers, gaming and home entertainment systems, and will be showcased at International CES 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada from January 8 to 11, 2009.

Christmas MAC vs PC

Microsoft releases the FiX for IE flaw kb960714 available for download

It is available via automatic updates or manual Download the KB960714 Apply patches.

Nvidia moves into netbook space

Everyone knows that today's netbook market is dominated by Intel's Atom processor, a processor which has enjoyed near universal praise. However, the associated chipsets attached to the Atom platform are quite another matter, and it's here Haas sees Nvidia's chance to change the game.

OSX upgrade crashes Macs :)

APPLE which bases mucho of its marketing on the fact that its rivals crash a lot, has just released an update for its Mac OS X that... er, crashes a lot.

Microsoft Issuing Emergency Patch For Internet Explorer

Microsoft is planning to release an out-of-band patch for Internet Explorer on Wednesday to address a critical security vulnerability that is being actively exploited.

SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 Released

Service Pack 3 for Microsoft SQL Server

Seagate Lowers Warranty Period from 5 to 3 Years on Some Desktop Hard Drives

Seagate, the biggest hard drive manufacturer, has announced today that effective January 3, 2009, the company will be making some important changes to its limited warranty terms for selected drives. The warranty period for consumer electronics (Seagate Barracuda 7200 included), notebook (Momentus 7200 and Momentus 5400 included) and personal storage bare drives sold to Seagate Authorized Distributors will be changed from 5 years to 3 years. Seagate believes that the new warranty period and terms better reflect current industry standards. Seagate enterprise class drives and Seagate and Maxtor external retail products that have 5-year warranty periods will not be affected by this change.

Google Chrome ditches beta label

Google Inc. dropped the beta label from its three-month-old browser today, saying that Chrome is ready for prime time.