AOL Rebuilds AIM

Internet portal AOL has initiated a major makeover of its instant-messaging client with an early-stage beta test of a new architecture and code base dubbed Triton. The new AOL instant messaging (AIM) architecture takes a modular approach to building messaging applications and supports features such as live PC-to-PC voice communications, streaming video messaging and media file transfers.

Source: Life really needs to get Laid

Flash hard drives

A hybrid memory system, combining a hard drive and flash memory, has been demonstrated by Samsung and Microsoft. The aim is to combine the fast read/write access times of NAND flash with the storage capacity of a rotating hard drive. By using the 1Gbit flash as a cache for the hard drive, the drive does not need to spin continuously. When the write buffer is full, the drive is spun up and data written to magnetic storage.

Boot up times can also be reduced, claimed the firms, by using the flash as a boot buffer during shut-down. Microsoft calls the device a hybrid hard drive (HHD). It is designed to work with Longhorn, the next generation of Windows. "Hybrid drive architecture... is an advancement that will improve the performance and reliability of any computer using the Windows Longhorn operating system," said Tom Phillips, general manager of Microsoft's Windows group.
News source: electronicsweekly

WinHEC's Longhorn Build 5048 leaks

Also from Flexbeta

Well Microsoft's WinHEC conference doesn't officially start until tomorrow (Monday, April 25th) , but Longhorn has managed to make its way to the web. Screenshots are going to follow.

French court rules in favor of DVD copying

I found this interesting post at Flexbeta:

Engadget writes, apparently a French court has ruled that adding anti-copying mechanisms to a DVD violates the rights consumers have to make private copies of media that they’ve bought and paid for. Reportedly the court has given the company that released the film in question one month to provide the guy who sued them with an unprotected DVD; it’s not entirely clear whether this ruling applies to every DVD sold in France or just that one copy of Mulholland Drive this guy was trying to dub. Either way, expect the film industry to throw its entire weight behind getting this ruling overturned.

A few details about IE7

The Internet Explorer Team has released a few more details about their upcoming Internet Explorer 7.

Here's an exceprt from their blog

"We’ve heard some great feedback on what web developers would like to see in IE7, both from the responses to my last post and from the resources I referred to. The rest of the team was cranking away while I was away on parental leave, and I wanted to share a few details about what they were doing: The first couple of things they’ve done are:

• Support the alpha channel in PNG images. We’ve actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community that per-pixel alpha is a really important feature.
  
• Address CSS consistency problems. Our first and most important goal with our Cascading Style Sheet support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely. For example, we have already checked in the fixes to the peekaboo and guillotine...."
  

Read more Here

Opera

An overly excited Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software, today proclaimed at an internal company meeting that if the download numbers of the new Opera 8 Web browser reach 1 million within the first four days of the launch, he will swim from Norway to the USA with only one stop-over for a cup of hot chocolate at his mother's house in his home country, Iceland.

Opera's communications department could obviously not resist to make such a bold and inarguably over-confident statement public. Opera's new Web browser, Opera 8, was released Tuesday, and the massive response had Opera's download servers kneeling an hour after the launch. Still, the download numbers of Opera 8 reached 600 000 in the first 48 hours.

Download: Opera 8
News source: Opera Press Release

US Judge Dismisses California Claims Versus Microsoft

A federal judge on Monday dismissed a claim by five California cities and counties that Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, had overcharged them for software. U.S. District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore, Maryland, granted Microsoft's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, saying that some of the plaintiffs were not allowed to sue because of their status as municipal corporations and that the statute of limitations had expired on several of the claims.

The plaintiffs, which included the City and County of San Francisco, city of Los Angeles and the counties of Santa Clara, San Mateo and Los Angeles, sued the Redmond, Washington-based software maker last August for violating antitrust and unfair competition laws in California. "Today's decision granting Microsoft's motion to dismiss is welcome news," Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said in a statement. "We look forward to continuing to work with California government agencies to help deliver technology solutions to their communities."

News source: e-Week, Neowin.net

FeedMonster CTP Release

I have just released my newest program called FeedMonster. FeedMonster is an RSS Feed reader written VB.NET on the .NET Framework 1.1. Notice I didn't say any thing about Atom in that sentence well thats because I have no Atom engine nor the knowhow to create one. So if there is anyone out there who wishes to create one comment this post to let me know.

The neatest part of this program I think would have to be the UI. Its styled after Office 2003.

Here is a screen shot:



and here's the Download link

If you find any bugs in FeedMonster click the picture below to send me an email with the description and the steps to reproduce the bug.

Mozilla releases new Firefox

Mozilla has released version 1.03 of Firefox. This isn't really a MAJOR release just one that includes a few security updates and some improvements in the update process, but nothing really MAJOR.

Anyway here's the download link for those who want it:

Download Firefox 1.03