From DailyTech: Ever since Microsoft released the beta of its upcoming Windows 7 to the general public, hundreds of thousands of users have downloaded the OS. Many took the time to carefully sweep the system, scanning for defects or bugs. As a result, Microsoft has been receiving a steady stream of information from beta testers. Many testers of late, though, have become disgruntled as Microsoft has offered little in the way of official communication about the problems its testers were reporting.

However, Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, has broken the silence at last, saying that Microsoft has indeed been listening and has fixes planned for over 2,000 bugs found by testers.

Mr. Sinofsky writes that at its peak, Microsoft was receiving one Send Feedback report every 15 seconds for an entire week. It has received 500,000 feedback reports already -- approximately 500 per developer, part of why it has been too busy to say much. Microsoft also thanks its Connect members (the MSDN/Technet enrolled beta customers) for sending in numerous technical reports. Both the public and the Connect feedback has helped more bugs be found and fixed than in any previous Windows release, Mr. Sinofsky states.

Mr. Sinofsky shed light on Microsoft's definition of a bug as well, stating:

"Let's talk a bit about "bugs". Up front it is worth making sure we're on the same page when we use the much overloaded term bug. For us a bug is any time the software does something that someone one wasn't expecting it to do. A bug can be a cosmetic issue, a consistency issue, a crash, a hang, a failure to succeed, a confusing user experience, a compatibility issue, a missing feature, or any one of dozens of different ways that the software can behave in a way that isn't expected. A bug for us is not an emotional term, but just shorthand for an entry in our database representing feedback on the product. Bugs can be reported by a human or by the various forms of telemetry built into Windows 7. This broad definition allows us to track and catalog everything experienced in the product and do so in a uniform manner."

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From X-bit Labs: The chief executive officer of the world’s largest maker of cell phones, Nokia, said in an interview that his company might be interested in entering mobile personal computer business. The company did not outline exact plans, but if Nokia starts to sell personal computers, the market may face rather significant changes. There is a problem though: Nokia has once quit PC biz already.

“We are looking very actively also at this [mobile PC] opportunity. […] We don’t have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a cell phone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging,” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, chief exec of Nokia, in an interview with Finnish YLE TV channel, reports Reuters news-agency.

This is not the first time when information regarding Nokia’s intention to (re)-enter the market of personal computers transpires, but the claim made by the CEO may be considered as an official confirmation of certain plans.

It is not completely clear whether Mr. Kallasvuo referred to notebooks or netbooks in the interview. The market of netbooks may pose a lot of interest to Nokia as netbooks are used widely to access the Internet using cell networks. Moreover, Nokia already has mobile Internet devices (MIDs) in the lineup (N810 Internet Tablet, for example) and there are a lot of similar between MIDs and netbooks.

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From X-bit Labs: Kingston Technology, the world’s largest producer of memory modules, has demonstrated a desktop system with 24GB of system memory. The company plans to ship the appropriate memory module kit under its “ValueRAM” brand (the kit will not be value) late in the year for those, who uses extremely demanding software or runs several virtual machines on desktops.

In order to demonstrate its 4GB unbuffered DDR3 memory modules, Kingston used system based on Intel Core i7 920 central processing unit, Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 as well as an Nvidia GeForce graphics card. The system had VMware workstation turned on, along with 9 VM clients and a copy of Crysis.

The demo demonstrated rather obvious: when ten computers are running on one desktops, they consume a lot of memory and even 24GB will be consumed. There are a number of professional software applications that may potentially benefit from so high amount of memory, but there are not a lot of end-users who would run them on single-socket machine at home.

Six Kingston’s 4GB unbuffered DDR3 SDRAM memory modules operated at 1079MHz with CL7 7-7-20 latency settings in triple-channel mode. The single-sided models are based on 4Gb memory chips made using 50nm process technology recently unveiled by Samsung Electronics, hence, this is the world’s first public demo of the rather revolutionary DRAMs.

Kingston said that 24GB memory kits will be available late in 2009. The company did not reveal the price of the kit, but said that the set of modules based on engineering samples cost around $2000 to manufacture.

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From InfoWorld: Contrary to Apple's claims, the newest version of Safari is not the world's fastest browser, benchmark scores show. But it is dramatically faster than rivals being built by Mozilla and Microsoft.

According to JavaScript rendering tests run by Computerworld, the public beta of Safari 4 is in a virtual dead heat with the most recent edition of Google's Chrome, but is 38 percent faster than the newest version of Firefox, more than three times faster than the production edition of that open-source browser, and over five times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8.

Computerworld ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite in Windows XP three times for each browser, then averaged the scores.

Safari 4, which Apple released Tuesday as a public beta , scored just slightly higher than Chrome 2.0.164.0, a developer-only build of Google's browser that was issued only last week. The difference, however, was minute: Google was only about 7 percent faster. Although Chrome and Safari are both built around the same open-source WebKit engine, they use different JavaScript engines. The former features Google's own V8 engine, while Safari 4 relies on Apple's new Nitro.

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From PC World: Lenovo Group will cut 450 jobs in China, expanding efforts to cut costs as the company struggles with sagging PC sales.

The affected Chinese employees all work in positions that support Lenovo's global business, the company said in an e-mail statement.

"While our business in China remains very strong, many of our global support functions have employees based in China. Although difficult, these reductions are a necessary part of our response to the global economic downturn," Yang Yuanqing, the company's CEO, said in the statement.

The latest round of job cuts come on top of 2,500 layoffs announced last month and highlights the severity of the challenges that Lenovo now faces. China's largest PC maker, Lenovo has seen sales drop in its home market, a problem that is compounded by sinking sales in India, Europe and North America.

Earlier this month, former CEO William Amelio stepped down from the company. The announcement came at the same time Lenovo announced a 20 percent drop in fourth-quarter sales. Amelio was replaced by Yang, who stepped down as chairman to take the CEO title he held prior to the 2005 acquisition of IBM's PC division. Liu Chuanzhi, Lenovo's former chairman, returned to take his old position.

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From CNET News.com: The day after a 2.5-hour Gmail outage, Google has launched a promised Google Apps status dashboard to better communicate with customers whether their online applications are up and running.

When a needed service fails, people can be mollified--and can better plan what to do--if they hear what's going on and, what went wrong, and when the service will return. To this end, sites such as SalesForce.com and Amazon Web Services offer dashboards that show how well their services are functioning. Now Google has followed suit.

"The Google Apps Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will be particularly useful for our business users, and it's also relevant to users of our consumer products," said Tessa Prescott of the Google Apps sales team in a blog post Wednesday. "Customers can use this Status Dashboard to check on the current service status of individual services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Video for business."

In the case of the recent Gmail outage, Google offers information about when the problem was discovered, the status of its repair, and a detailed postmortem of what went wrong.

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From DailyTech: Apparently even when off the job, Apple's divisive, but brilliant leader Steve Jobs is still on the job. At a one hour annual shareholder meeting held at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, executives said that while Jobs was away, he still was putting in a great deal of work directing the company behind the scenes. They said that he was deeply involved in their decision making process.

Steve Jobs, who founded Apple and guided it through its two most successful spans -- the Apple II/Mac era and then the iProduct era -- had been the subject of wild rumors last year, when he appeared gaunt and sickly at public appearances. He initially brushed off the concerns, eventually breaking his silence this January to say he had hormonal problems, which he was receiving treatment for. However, later in January he announced that he was taking a leave of absence until June, citing that his medical issues were "more complex" than previously expected.

The news launched wild speculation, as Jobs was diagnosed in 2004 with a rare kind of pancreatic cancer, which he received treatment for and apparently had fully recovered from. Many wonder -- and still do -- whether Apple could continue its recent successes without Jobs' guiding hand.

However, Apple's top executives went on record at the meeting to state that "nothing has changed" with Jobs' health. They also declined address recent allegations that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the company's disclosures of Jobs' health problems for possible misconduct.

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From DailyTech: Japanese cell phone provider SoftBank has implemented a temporary promotion that offers customers a free 8GB iPhone with a two-year contract. The 8GB version is free with the basic, premium, or student plan. The 16GB version costs ¥11,520 ($120USD) and the cost is spread out over two years as an additional ¥480 ($5USD) added to the monthly fee. This is a common practice often used to tack on additional fees in Japan.

The promotion is called the "iPhone for Everybody Campaign" and runs until the end of May. In addition to the free iPhone promotion, Softbank has also dropped the maximum price of the standard data plan to ¥4410 ($45USD) from ¥5985 ($62USD).

In Japan the iPhone launched on July 11, 2008 to mixed success. Only a month after launch Softbank was dropping fees in order to attract more customers to the iPhone. When it launched, the iPhone was lacking features specific to the Japanese market that exists on almost all cell phones in this market. Features the iPhone lacks include the ability to pay for purchases using the phone called FeliCA, the ability to watch television on the phone using the 1Seg service, and the inability to text message using one hand which is standard practice in Japan.

Despite its struggles, the iPhone has been able to stay in the Japanese market and at least compete. This is impressive in of itself as even Nokia has given up and pulled out of the Japanese Market. Although Japanese cell phones do incorporate many advanced features, the interface and the menus are often complicated and difficult to use.

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