cynergygroup.com

Eric Shepherd, who oversees Mozilla documentation work, called the plans just an initial sketch, so don’t consider this the final word on Firefox 3.6 features.

Brace yourself for the vanishing menu bar because Mozilla has published an official feature list for Firefox 3.6 in the form of a guide for programmers who need to know about the changes.

Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 in June. Future work on the upcoming Firefox, code-named Namoroka, emphasizes performance, integration with system services such as dictionaries, and Web applications. It’s due in early to mid-2010.

The Firefox 3.6 developer guide mentions an ability to automatically hide the menu bar, a change that dovetails with sparer Firefox user interface designs that Mozilla has begun exploring for Firefox versions 3.7 and 4.0. That’s important for plug-in developers and others who use the menu bar to control their add-ons.

For those developing Web applications, there’s a feature for adding sounds that can play in response to specific events. That sounds useful for notifying people of new e-mail, instant messages, or any number of events in Web applications that today have trouble getting your attention as easily as software running natively on the operating system.

Another change lets the browser supply not just latitude and longitude coordinates but also human-friendly address terms such as street, city, and postal code. The addition of geolocation features, which enable authorized Web sites do things like show your location and nearby coffee shops on a map, is one of the significant features in Firefox 3.5.

Scientists find that radiofrequency ablation, a minimally invasive procedure using heat to shrink soft palate tissue, can minimize snoring for years.

(Credit: CC Looking Glass/Flickr)

The procedure, called radiofrequency ablation, or RFA, uses heat to shrink soft palate tissue. Because it is minimally invasive, performed with imaging from X-rays or CT scans, it has become a widespread treatment in the past decade of not only primary snoring (snoring without sleep apnea) but also cancer, cardiac arrhythmia, arthritis, and even varicose veins.

Unlike previously used low-frequency AC or DC, RF current does not directly stimulate nerves or muscle, so does not require general anesthesia. Still, long-term efficacy in primary snorers had yet to be studied thoroughly, according to researchers of a new study.

For couples dealing with this kind of sleep disruption on a regular basis, it’s probably not a stretch to say that a minimally invasive treatment that stops or significantly reduces snoring could save relationships.

On a recent camping trip, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking we had a bear grunting just outside our tent; heart racing, I turned on my head lamp to investigate. Turns out my husband, who rarely snores, sounds like a bear when he does. I tossed and turned for an hour until finally shaking him awake to shut him up.

In a paper presented last weekend at the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation’s annual meeting in San Diego, researchers studied RFA as a treatment for 60 primary snorers over a three-year period. After two treatments, snoring became less severe, and 76 percent of patients reported satisfaction with the treatment and its effects at a three-year follow-up, according to the study.

Researchers say that primary snoring could be an early predictor for people who later develop obstructive sleep apnea. Unlike apnea, for which there are several surgeries, no widely accepted gold standard treatment has been developed to treat primary snoring.

If we’re honest, most of us are either snorers or sleeping next to one.

Long-term research results surrounding radiofrequency surgery on primary snorers have been limited, the researchers say. As a result, this study could guide physicians and patients in choosing effective treatment.

However, the allegation is not merely that Goodrich told the employee that he would, indeed, blast his iPhone. For he is accused of revealing that he happened to have the perfect little weapon behind the right side of his shirt. (Strangely, it was a black shirt.)

According to WCPO9 (which is a Cincinnati TV station rather than C-3PO’s illicit lover), Donald Goodrich, 38, wafted into this very Apple store.
His cup appears not to have been overflowing with joy for his iPhone.

Some shout at Comcast cable boxes that refuse to delete recorded shows, leaving no room for new ones.

Others smack their microwaves when, commanded to heat some old spaghetti bolognese, they get stuck with 45 seconds to go.

This is not, to my knowledge, an iPhone that was already shot.

If your iPhone is causing you difficulties, don’t smoke it, stroke it. Or take it to an Apple store where a genius will offer counseling.

(Credit: CC Johan Larsson/Flickr)

I am not sure how many people are so intimidated by the Apple store’s graphic perfection and preternatural youthfulness that they actually take an extra 9mm with them.

Court papers do not seem to be specific as to what element might have been malfunctioning on his 115.5mm-long gadget. However, they do allege that Goodrich told an Apple store employee that he was “so mad, I could pop a 9mm at it.”

We all express frustration with our electronica in different ways.

You will perhaps experience a sense of stunned discomfort when I tell you that Goodrich has, indeed, been charged with aggravated menacing and causing fear of harm to an Apple employee.

Which makes one wonder what thoughts might have been brewing at the Kenwood Towne Centre Apple store in Cincinnati on Thursday.

But few are those who threaten to blast their gadget and actually mean it.

Taking a gun to a gadget is like taking a blow-up doll to a dinner party. It doesn’t reflect well on you at all.

Oh, as well as something of a concealed weapons violation. You see, he had a concealed weapons permit, but omitted to mention to the arresting deputy that he actually had the gun on his person, according to WCPO9. A frustrating iPhone can sometimes affect one’s memory.

“I feel pretty good about how we are tracking,” he said, noting that half of Microsoft’s in-boxes–some 80,000–are now on the new version of Exchange. ”
We’ll definitely be ready this year.”

Among its features is one that lets users “mute” an e-mail thread that they are no longer interested in being part of.

“With Exchange, we don’t give them any kind of technology ultimatum,” Jha said. “We don’t say ‘Thou shalt move to the cloud.’ ”

Microsoft has shifted its priorities, though. Unlike past versions of Exchange, Microsoft developed Exchange 2010 as a service first, and only later has it done the work on the server product. That server product, which has been in testing for some time and reached the beta stage in April, is now ready in a near-final “release candidate” form.

In addition to Google, IBM continues to push its Lotus Domino/Notes combination while Cisco has said it will have a Linux-based e-mail offering based on last year’s Postpath acquisition.

Microsoft's Rajesh Jha, shown here in his office earlier this year, says the shift from a world of servers to a world of services need not spell trouble for the Exchange business.

In a year in which many software businesses–including a number within Microsoft–took a hit, the Exchange business continued to grow last year, Jha said, saying that revenue for the product nearly hit $2 billion and has 70 percent market share among corporate users.

“It is where people spend more of their hours,” Jha said. “It’s become a real critical part of the day. Our competitors are smart. They see it too.”

In an interview on Monday, Jha said that, although many see the rise of services as more of a benefit to companies like Google, he sees it as an opportunity for his business.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET)

Sounding a familiar refrain, Jha said that he expects customers to warm to Microsoft’s strategy, which lets them have the option of running Exchange themselves or purchasing it as a subscription hosted service.

The fact that many customers are shifting from running their own e-mail servers to getting mail as a hosted service doesn’t have to spell doom for Microsoft, insists Rajesh Jha, the man who heads the Exchange business.

Jha acknowledged, though, that competition for the in-box is definitely heating up.

“I feel we will grow our share overall with the move to services,” Jha said. In particular, Jha said that Microsoft has a better option for small and midsize businesses than it did when its only option was for those companies to run their own Exchange servers. “I think we have a huge opportunity for growth. I don’t think we are in a defensive position at all.”

Jha reiterated that the final version of Exchange 2010 should be done later this year.

Production on the plant in Coalinga, Calif., is slated to begin by the end of 2010, Chevron executives told Reuters. Chevron Technology Ventures, the company’s venture arm, is an investor in BrightSource Energy.

Solar power, it turns out, can mean more than just clean electrons and home hot water systems.

The system will use 7,000 mirrors on Chevron-owned land to reflect light onto a tower to make steam. The steam will be pumped underground to heat up heavy oils and make them easier to extract, according to a Reuters report. Right now, Chevron uses natural gas to make steam.

BrightSource Energy’s main business continues to be utility-scale solar. But another young solar company, Ausra, shifted its focus from building solar power plants to using its solar thermal technology to make a system for different industrial processes.

Concentrating solar power has emerged as one of the most cost-effective solar technologies for utility-scale solar projects. Using mirrors or reflective troughs, sunlight from desert areas is concentrated onto a liquid that makes steam. In a power plant, that steam turns a turbine to make electricity.

(Credit:
BrightSource Energy)

BrightSource Energy's demonstration facility in Israel’s Negev Desert, where an array of heliostats, or moving mirrors, concentrate light onto a tower to make steam.

Chevron on Friday disclosed plans to use solar thermal technology from BrightSource Energy to enhance oil recovery from an aging well in central California.

On Tuesday, IBM will give a presentation on its next-generation server chip, the Power7. IBM documentation describes the chip as having up to eight cores. A dual-chip module holds two processors for a total of 16 cores, according to IBM.

The Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, Calif this week is focusing on high-end chips for servers and scientific computers, with IBM’s upcoming Power7 as a standout.

Each core has a rated performance of 32 gigaflops, providing 256 gigaflops per processor–one of the fastest chips to date based on this scientific-centric performance benchmark.

Other chips to be described at the conference include the Sparc64 VIIIfx: Fujitsu’s new 8-core processor for Peta scale computing. Sun will discuss its “next-generation multi-threaded processor Rainbow Falls” and AMD will spell out its Magny Cours processor, 12-core chip.

Power7 will be used in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications “Blue Waters” supercomputer, the first system of its kind to sustain one petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications, according to the NCSA. A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Intel will present a paper on its upcoming Nehalem server processor.

Intel will also discuss Moorestown, an upcoming version of the Atom processor targeted at mobile Internet devices and smartphones. Intel will also give a presentation entitled “Understanding the Intel Next Generation Microarchitectures (Nehalem and Westmere) transitioning into the Mainstream.”

Power7 “will be the first of a powerful new system design from IBM. The design includes extensive research and development in new chip technology, interconnect technology, operating systems, compiler, and programming environments,” according to the NCSA.

(Credit:
TravelTrac)

After seeing the presentation Tuesday morning at DemoFall 09 from TravelTrac, I’m hopeful that this dynamic may be changing.

And that is exactly what modern social media and devices like the iPhone are supposed to be about. It’s nice to see someone applying these things to something so many people do.

The main idea behind TravelTrac is to “share adventures as they happen.” This works by enabling people to use their iPhones to share their experiences as they have them. Users can post videos, photographs, their location, and journal entries, whether they’re online. If someone is online while doing the posts, the content goes live right away. When not online, those posts go live the next time a user connects.

TravelTrac is built around the concept of creating traveling communities, and the company has broken down its users’ experiences into three main areas: MotoTrac, for those who travel by motorcycle; TrekTrac, for those who travel on land by car, train, RV, or other vehicle; and SailTrac, for those who prefer maritime travel.

Regardless of which method someone travels by, what’s nice about this is that it allows users to share the best parts–or the worst, if that’s what’s important in the moment–of their journeys, and for everyone else to benefit from that knowledge. And because the service allows the sharing of a wide range of media, it means that there will be a new form of collective memory of traveling, no matter where people go.

SAN DIEGO–It’s great to see modern technology applied to experiences we’ve all had for years. One thing that many people share is the difficulty of getting the most out of traveling, and helping others benefit from what we’ve learned on our own travels.

TravelTrac enables users to share their travel experiences in real time, with easy uploading of photos, videos, and more.

Related:
Yahoo’s Delicious adds a little Twitter
Full TechCrunch50 coverage

Instant's front page is made up entirely of real-time chatter.

Insttant, on the other hand, cuts out traditional news sources entirely and uses Twitter’s public stream instead. It takes these tweets and turns them into an interactive news page that covers people, places, and companies, including a way to track trending topics and user sentiment. All of this goes on a front page, which can be reordered and personalized with topics the user wants to see.

Thoora is a new tool that clusters and aggregates news. It offers people a way to track the latest headlines with a simple ranking tool, ordering incoming stories by “Web reaction.” It uses a mix of sources, including Twitter messages, blog posts, and breaking stories from more traditional news outlets. These stories are then filtered and pushed to a front page as well as Thoora’s category pages.

Thoora tracks hot news topics across a variety of chatter networks including blog comments, tweets, and news stories.

One of the service’s more interesting tricks is that it automatically creates profile pages for people containing links and interests based on what they’ve shared in their tweets. This also happens for trending news topics, which makes for a more in-depth news-reading experience, since you can drill down on any topic and see things like recent mentions, related news and links, and a history of how popular it’s been in the past few weeks.

SAN FRANCISCO–Two new companies are launching products designed to get the news to users faster–and from a wider variety of sources. Both are in private beta and not yet available to the general public but were demoed live at the TechCrunch50 conference.

(Credit:
Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

(Credit:
Insttant)

One of the things that factors into what ends up on Thoora’s front page is real-time chatter. The company tracks how many news-related tweets there have been about that topic in the last hour, as well as “Twitter impact,” which is a percentage of density about that topic per 500 messages across all of Twitter over the past hour. It also tracks things like blog comments and linkbacks.

Hello and welcome to the Reporters Roundtable, CNET’s weekly deep dive into the main story of the week. I’m Rafe Needleman from CNET News. In this, our first episode in the new live format, we’ll be discussing Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ announcements in San Francisco on Wednesday. Our guests today are

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Why Apple hasn’t retired the iPod Classic

Apple’s new extended formats (albums and video extras)

How important is FM radio

Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

Let’s start with a recap. On September 9, Steve Jobs returned to the public eye in his first major launch announcement since his medical leave and subsequent liver transplant surgery. At the press event, he announced a new line of iPods some with video cameras, a new version of iTunes with social and sharing features, an update of the iPhone operating system, and new digital formats for music and videos.

Host Rafe Needleman
Producer Lynn Fu
Guest Erica Ogg
Guest Greg Sandoval
Guest Donald Bell

EPISODE 1 - Notes

Reporters Roundtable # 1: Apple Analysis

The Beatles (or lack thereof)

Wrapup—

Thanks for listening to Reporters Roundtable. We’re on live each Friday at 1 p.m. Pacific time. Got questions? E-mail rafe@cnet.com. We’ll see you next time!

Ringtone business for Apple

On September 9, Steve Jobs returned to the public eye in his first major launch announcement since his medical leave and subsequent liver transplant surgery. At the event, he announced a new line of iPods, new digital formats for music and videos, and, sadly, nothing from the Beatles. Rafe Needleman hosts, with Donald Bell, Erica Ogg, and Greg Sandoval.

Thanks all for your time.

Reporter Erica Ogg from CNET News. Erica is the Apple reporter and was at the keynote
Senior writer Greg Sandoval from CNET News. Greg covers the music industry in depth.
Senior Editor Donald Bell from CNET reviews. Donald reviews music players.

INTRO

Content and formats—

Apple taking on the Flip with the Nano? Why?

What’s next? Tablet? TV? Beatles?

Do we think they’ve got the right lineup

Was this an important event?

Erica, Greg, Donald, welcome

iPhone App store - any word on the approval process for apps?

In this first episode of the new Reporters’ Roundtable, I talk with Apple experts at CNET about the 9/9/09 Steve Jobs keynote. Read on if you want the raw show notes, but click the audio or video stream to get the real content.

Why no cam in the Touch - bad part?

So let’s get into it. How’d Steve do up there?

iPhone update?—

Hardware —

TALKING POINTS

But for a system integrator like Potts’ employer, Optaros, code is critical. Potts is particularly well-suited to call this out, given that prior to Optaros he was a vice president at Hitachi Consulting where he did Documentum and other proprietary software deployments.

While Potts, in his response to a Documentum developer post, lists several reasons that open source is superior to proprietary software for developers, it’s ultimately source code availability that underlies them all:

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

It’s absolutely true that most open-source code gets used and not modified. Few bother to to view the source code.

Not much. For system integrators, in particular, source code is essential. Proprietary vendors that treat their products like a “black box” that can only be accessed through a magical API are doing their partners, and hence themselves, a disservice.

Developers working with closed source ECM vendors can’t see the code. It’s obvious, I know. For developers that work with open source it is extremely natural to use the CMS [Content Management System] source code when debugging or for reference. You don’t even think about it-it’s just there and you use it. Imagine the frustration of someone who works with closed source CMS who has to routinely decompile classes to figure out what’s going on. That truly sucks. What good is a “Developer Edition” that doesn’t come with source code?

Jeff Potts

Open source has been a big winner in the recession, given its ability to drive down costs. For those that think the proprietary world can easily follow suit, however, simply by giving away “express” versions of their software, or through developer programs, Optaros consultant Jeff Potts has some advice: “Try again.”

Disclosure: Optaros is an Alfresco partner, and also works with a range of open-source CMSes, including competitors to Alfresco.