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With the launch of the Windows 7 release candidate, anticipation is growing over Microsoft's new OS. So is the upgrade really worth waiting for?The new Windows is edging closer to release. This week, Microsoft has made the release candidate (RC) available to anyone who wants to try it; and although the company has not announced the final release date, Acer's UK managing director, Bobby Watkins, recently told the press that machines with Windows 7 installed will be on sale from 23 October.Despite its name, there is no chance that the release candidate version will be the final one. Rather, it is the last round of testing before completing the software and issuing it to PC vendors. Acer's date looks plausible, allowing two or three months for Microsoft to finalise the software, and the same again for vendors to prepare and distribute Windows 7 PCs.Feeling positiveEarly adopters are mainly positive. 'Much better than Vista and just as stable as XP,' writes a user on the unofficial Windows

With the launch of the Windows 7 release candidate, anticipation is growing over Microsoft's new OS. So is the upgrade really worth waiting for?The new Windows is edging closer to release. This week, Microsoft has made the release candidate (RC) available to anyone who wants to try it; and although the company has not announced the final release date, Acer's UK managing director, Bobby Watkins, recently told the press that machines with Windows 7 installed will be on sale from 23 October.Despite its name, there is no chance that the release candidate version will be the final one. Rather, it is the last round of testing before completing the software and issuing it to PC vendors. Acer's date looks plausible, allowing two or three months for Microsoft to finalise the software, and the same again for vendors to prepare and distribute Windows 7 PCs.Feeling positiveEarly adopters are mainly positive. 'Much better than Vista and just as stable as XP,' writes a user on the unofficial Windows

In Brief: A rumor suggests Apple may be ready to release Mac OS X 10.5.7 as early as Friday. A California teen claims to have sent and received over 300,000 text messages on an iPhone in one month, while AdWhirl now serves over 200 million advertisements from App Store titles. seyDoggy has released a new Ultimate Theme for RapidWeaver, TW002 r4. Laserface Jones has won the uDevGames 2008 competiti...

Director Wilson Yip's Ip Man stars Donnie Yen playing the quiet and unassuming Wing Chun master Ip Man. source: Jigoku DenryuuPublished: May 06, 2009

Given the unpredictable nature of today's market climate, many software-oriented companies are scrambling to cut costs and streamline their application development processes. For organizations utilizing Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 as their primary development environment, the difficulty of achieving this agility was magnified by the April 8, 2008, termination of all support for VB6.

Iain Thomson in San Francisco, vnunet.com, Thursday 7 May 2009 at 01:22:00 Philip Gabriel Pettersson accused of stealing router source code A 21-year old Swedish hacker has been indicted (PDF) on charges of stealing source code from networking firm Cisco. Philip Gabriel Pettersson, aka 'Stakkato', is accused of breaking into Cisco's servers between 12 and 13 May 2004, and stealing the source code for the firm's Internetwork Operating System (IOS). He was 16 at the time of the attacks. Pettersson allegedly posted 2.5MB of the 800MB of IOS code on an IRC channel to prove that he had successfully completed the hack, according to reports. It is not known whether he used the software to find vulnerabilities in Cisco's products. 'Cisco reported that it did not believe that any customer information, partner information or financial systems were affected,' according to the indictment. Pettersson is also charged with breaking into Nasa servers in May and October 2004, in particular t

Nokia, the world's top mobile phone maker, today unveiled the E52 smartphone, an Eseries business device that claims eight hours of talk time and 23 days of standby time.

Geneva - The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday confirmed 1,658 cases of the new influenza A(H1N1) virus in 23 countries. Mexico reported 946 laboratory-confirmed cases, including 29 deaths, Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the health agency ...

In a new report, SSD market researcher iSuppli said the increased deployment of SSDs could enable the world's data centers to reduce their cumulative electricity consumption by a whopping 166,643 megawatt hours from 2008 to 2013. This amounts to slightly more than the total electricity generation of the African nation of Gambia for the entire year of 2006, - Most people are already aware that solid-state server and storage disks only use a portion -- as little as one-half or less -- of the electrical power that a spinning hard disk requires, simply because there are no moving parts that need energy to activate them. As SSDs move slowly but surely in...

According to The NPD Group, first-quarter 2009 sales of stand-alone Blu-ray players (read: not including the PS3) in the U.S. surpassed 400,000 units, an increase of 72 percent over Q1 2008.