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Preview Pane, which is now available in Gmail Labs, allows users to simultaneously preview parts of an email while reading or replying to others. Users of Gmail for iPad or Android will instantly recognize the interface — its design is directly inspired by the email service’s mobile web apps.

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Besides performance and reliability enhancements, this new version also brings new features to core webOS apps such as Email, Calendar and Photos.

Among the highlights are improved image rendering and faster scrolling in Email, the ability to set your wallpaper from photos in the Photos app, new layout of the Calendar, reduced audio skipping in Music when using other apps, and improved speed and accuracy of autocorrections when typing.

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For now, I'll tell you that after spending a lot of time with OS X Lion--the client--there are some issues, as I mentioned. It isn't sterling. The Launchpad implementation feels awkward on OS X. Some of the new features, like full-screen apps, take some getting used to.

For the most part, Mac users are going to embrace Lion. There's a learning curve, but that's to be expected. Apple has always pushed and challenged their users to embrace new technologies, often for the better.

Even with its flaws, I'm still psyched about Lion. It's a nice affordable update packed with more than 250 new features that sells for only $29.99.

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In the study, Dasient analyzed the live behavior of Android apps to determine their security posture. Of the 10,000 applications evaluated, more than 800 were found to be leaking personal data to an unauthorized server, Daswani says.

In addition, the researchers found that 11 of the applications were sending potentially unwanted SMS messages out to other smartphones--the mobile version of spam, Daswani says.

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Research In Motion on Wednesday announced the availability of BlackBerry Mobile Voice System 5 (MVS 5). The latest update to MVS brings with it compatibility with more enterprise communications systems, including Avaya Aura 6.1, Avaya Communications Manager, Avaya CS1000 Communication Server, Cisco Unified Communications Manager, and Mitel Communications Director.

(Later)BlackBerry MVS 5 ties together enterprise PBX phone systems with BlackBerry smartphones, allowing employees to have a single number that rings both their desk phone and BlackBerry. Employees also can use what would otherwise be PBX-only features, such as extension dialing, hold, transfer, and ad-hoc conferencing.

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The Spanish police said Friday that they had arrested three suspected computer hackers in connection with recent cyberattacks on Sony’s PlayStation Network as well as corporate and government Web sites around the world.

The arrests have dismantled the local leadership of the shadowy international network of computer hackers known as Anonymous, which has claimed responsibility for a wide variety of attacks, the National Police said in a statement.

(further)Sony has estimated that the hacker attacks will cost it at least 14 billion yen, or $173 million, in damages, including information technology spending, legal costs, lower sales and free offers to lure back customers.

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Twitter has begun automatically shortening URLs pasted into tweets by its users, the microblogging site announced today.

When users compose a tweet and paste a link of any length into the Tweet box, Twitter will automatically abbreviate the link to 19 characters when users hit send. In testing for almost exactly a year, the service--called t.co--is being rolled out incrementally and will wrap and abbreviate all links shared on the site in the same way other URL-shortening services, such as Bitly, do.

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Coming later this year in Mango is more native support of Xbox LIVE features in the Games Hub like:

· See your played games and unlocked/locked Achievements

· Compare Achievements with other Xbox LIVE members

· Search your list of friends to see who is online and what they are doing

· See your Xbox LIVE messages and Send/Accept/Reject friend requests

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"The video does a good job of showing just how different the new system will be. Optimized for touch-screens, but still purported to be friendly to mouse and keyboard users, Windows 8 appears to abandon many of the legacy interface ideas that have been around for years."

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Twitter has agreed to acquire TweetDeck, a Twitter desktop client preferred by many of the social-media service's most active users, for $40 million in cash and stock, according to a CNN report.

The deal has not been officially announced yet, but a purchase agreement was signed today, according to the report, which cited sources close to the deal.

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"We set the bar very high. We want to be the open iTunes," said Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, which publishes Miro and the Miro Video Converter, a separate program that also comes baked into the standard Miro. "Millions and millions of people use iTunes and they do because they accept the restrictions, like with Internet Explorer. We see ourselves as the new Firefox." He also added that Miro has "around two million" monthly users.

Except for the lack of over-the-air synchronization, the new Miro is basically the old Miro plus DoubleTwist. If you haven't checked out Miro in a while, since Miro 3's redesigned interface the feature-heavy program has gotten much easier to use. It heavily resembles iTunes, with a left nav for navigating between your audio, video, connected devices, Amazon MP3 store, and Android marketplaces. The new right nav links to recently watched videos, recently songs played, and recent downloads, while the center of the program is where your media discovery and playback happen.

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Mango, which will be available this fall, includes hundreds of new features and improvements organized around three key themes: easier communications, smarter apps, and the Internet.

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Such third-party apps need your permission to access certain information about your account. But in an effort to be more sensitive to privacy concerns, Twitter is shining more light on exactly what these apps want from you.

Now when you first try to sign into a third-party app using your Twitter credentials, Twitter will display a detailed permissions screen that lists exactly what information the app is requesting.

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It appears that the new Xbox LIVE update, which will introduce support for the new XGD3 disk format, might prevent a very small number of Xbox 360 owners from playing retail game discs.

The XGD3 format will allow for additional storage space on a game disc, and will provide additional levels of copy production.

The Xbox LIVE Spring update will be rolled out between May 19 to May 30.

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However, these professional services are not core business activities for Nokia, so since the introduction of the LGPL license for Qt in 2009 we have been actively working to grow the number of companies providing Qt services. In 2010 we began the search for a company we could work with to serve the commercial licensees in the Qt community. We have now concluded that search and chosen to work with Digia. As a consequence, Digia will acquire the Qt Commercial software licensing and professional services business from Nokia, with the transaction expected to close by the end of March 2011.

Employing hundreds of Qt experts, Digia has 7 years experience in providing top-class Qt competence, and is dedicated to continue and grow Qt Commercial relationships as well as to contribute innovation to the overall Qt LGPL and commercial community.

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Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same. With 200 million users worldwide and Nokia planning to sell around 150 million more Symbian devices, Symbian still offers unparalleled geographical scale for developers.

Extending the scope of Qt further will be our first MeeGo-related open source device, which we plan to ship later this year. Though our plans for MeeGo have been adapted in light of our planned partnership with Microsoft, that device will be compatible with applications developed within the Qt framework and so give Qt developers a further device to target.

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he new interface, is called Renderscript, said R. Jason Sams, an Android performance and graphics programmer at Google. He didn't say so in so many words, but the goal for the feature has to be better games on Android. It's a broader feature, though: it's used in Honeycomb's YouTube and Books apps.

"The target audience is the set of developers looking to maximize the performance of their applications and are comfortable working closer to the metal to achieve this," Sams said in a blog post yesterday. "The target use is for performance-critical code segments where the needs exceed the abilities of the existing APIs."

To that end, Renderscript exposes two hardware-accelerated interfaces, one for rendering 3D graphics and one for for power-efficient computing operations. To use it, Renderscript relies on a variant of the C99 version of the C programming language. And the Renderscript plumbing that comes along with Honeycomb, aka Android 3.0, makes the decisions about whether to run the computing jobs on regular or graphics processors.

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Bloomberg, which broke the news this afternoon, reported that sources familiar with Microsoft's plans said this version of Windows will continue to work on x86 processors, but that it should improve battery performance on devices like tablets and other devices that use ARM processors.

Additional confirmation of Microsoft's plans came from The Wall Street Journal, which added that this new version will not be available for another two years. CNET heard similar reports from a source who added that Microsoft plans to detail this version of Windows at an invite-only press event several hours ahead of its CES keynote.

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Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth told press recently that a move to daily updates would help the popular Linux disto keep pace with an increasingly complex software and platform ecosystem as Ubuntu goes on more devices and syncs up Android and iPhones.

Software Center - barely a year old - is leading these changes, and Shuttleworth has promised this would "go further and faster than people might have envisioned in the past."

"Today we have a six-month release cycle," Shuttleworth said. "In an internet-oriented world, we need to be able to release something every day.

"That's an area we will put a lot of work into in the next five years. The small steps we are putting in to the Software Center today, they will go further and caster than people might have envisioned in the past."

• Preliminary support for Intel Sandy Bridge processors
• GPU details for AMD Radeon HD 68xx and nVIDIA GeForce GTX 580
• Support for USB 3.0 controllers and devices
• Windows 7 style icons

• Control Panel applet issues under Windows Vista & Windows 7
• Memory Write benchmark on Intel Dunnington, Gulftown, Westmere
• L3 cache bandwidth measurement on Intel Core i3/i5/i7
• Installer package elevation issues under Windows 7

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This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as the K Desktop Environment 3.5.10 (KDE), an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 2.22.2, the Xfce 4.4.2 desktop environment, LXDE 0.3.2.1, the GNUstep desktop 7.3, X.Org 7.3, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, GIMP 2.4.7, Iceweasel 3.0.6 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox), Icedove 2.0.0.19 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird), PostgreSQL 8.3.6, MySQL 5.0.51a, GNU Compiler Collection 4.3.2, Linux kernel version 2.6.26, Apache 2.2.9, Samba 3.2.5, Python 2.5.2 and 2.4.6, Perl 5.10.0, PHP 5.2.6, Asterisk 1.4.21.2, Emacs 22, Inkscape 0.46, Nagios 3.06, Xen Hypervisor 3.2.1 (dom0 as well as domU support), OpenJDK 6b11, and more than 23,000 other ready-to-use software packages (built from over 12,000 source packages).

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The KDE port for Windows is still a work in progress and some aspects are still highly experimental, but it shows an enormous amount of potential and it has improved significantly over the past year. The port impressively demonstrates the growing platform-neutrality of the KDE desktop environment. As we have seen in the past, bringing open source software to alternate platforms can attract new contributors, accelerate development, and spread the use of open source development frameworks.

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The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities. With these changes, developers will be able to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework.

Qt 4.5 will also be available under commercial licensing terms, while licensing for previous versions of Qt remains unchanged. In addition, service offerings for Qt will be expanded to ensure that all Qt development projects can have access to the same levels of support, independent of the selected license.

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For years, IT has struggled with how best to maintain the flow of data across heterogeneous environments without incurring data loss. Monoculture or no, customers often want to save documents in a variety of formats. This has not always worked to Microsoft's advantage. In fact, last year, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency filed a complaint with the European Commission in which it alleged that Office 2007 would impede educational initiatives because it failed to natively support open standards, in particular, ODF.

Doug Mahugh, a project manager at Microsoft who deals with interoperability issues connected with the Office software suite, described the steps taken today within the broader context of disclosure, transparency, and format support. "To get there, we found that it was not just sufficient to conform to a standard. We needed transparency about all the design decisions involved in getting to that standard...it was a way of pulling together lot of the things we were doing in interoperability." Rightly or not, the perception was that Microsoft Office did not treat ODF as first class citizen. "That kind of feedback is why we built ODF support into SP 2," Mahugh said.

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Gamers, VoIP and video conference users beware. The leading BitTorrent software authors have declared war on you - and any users wanting to wring high performance out of their networks. A key design change in the P2P application promises to make the headaches faced by ISPs so far look like a party game. So what's happened, and why does it matter?

Upset about Bell Canada’s system for allocating bandwidth fairly among internet users, the developers of the uTorrent P2P application have decided to make the UDP protocol the default transport protocol for file transfers. BitTorrent implementations have long used UDP to exchange tracker information – the addresses of the computers where files could be found – but the new release uses it in preference to TCP for the actual transfer of files. The implications of this change are enormous.

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Intel is offering a "dashboard" for Windows that allows the user to choose and control which applications or files are loaded into the Intel Turbo Memory cache (based on flash memory chips) for performance acceleration. Intel calls this "User pinning." Custom pinning profiles can be created to pin applications or files that match the user's activity, according to Intel. Data intensive programs, gaming, digital media editing and productivity software are examples of applications that will see the most benefit, according to Intel. Intel is trying to address a longstanding shortcoming of Windows: its inability to take full advantage of flash storage devices. "There are issues related to taking full advantage of the speed of a (flash drive)," said Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel, in an interview at the Flash Memory Summit.

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The proprietary world feels the need to rebuild everyone else's software in order to create walled-garden ecosystems. Unfortunately, the open-source world builds even more variants of the same products, though for different reasons.

Are we the world's least efficient market? Imagine what would happen if we could all pull behind a few credible alternatives, rather than inventing 585 of them?