Gadget & Tech

Mozilla has just pushed out Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 to their servers, marking the first major step toward the official 3.1 release. They haven’t yet officially announced the beta release yet. Firefox 3.1 will introduce geolocation to the mix, streamlining the process required to get information from web sites based on your location. In the current release of Firefox, you needed to install the previously mentioned Geode extension to get this functionality, but it comes baked into 3.1.

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Richard Garriott, famed video game developer, is following in his father’s footsteps and has launched aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. Richard’s father Owen Garriott is a former NASA astronaut who completed two space missions during his career. Richard is the the first second generation American in space, and also the sixth private astronaut client of Space Adventures.

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Zoho made some significant changes to a core part of its cloud-based application suite Friday: its online mail application now works offline and with Apple’s iPhone, and the beta test is now publicly available.

The offline and mobile features are major areas of development for Web-based applications, and cloud computing advocates including Zoho, Yahoo, and Google are racing to build in those features. Offline access helps ameliorate Web-based applications’ limitations when no network is available, and mobile access helps fulfill one of the big promised advantages of Web applications: access your documents any time you do have network access.

Offline access, which in Zoho’s case is enabled with Google’s Gears technology, lets people read and write mail in the browser even when not connected to the network. “Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes seamlessly. While offline, you can respond to your emails as you would normally. When you go back online these emails will be sent out from your outbox,” the company said Friday.

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Google’s Picasa photo editing tool for Linux has caught up to its Windows sibling with a new beta 3 release. The latest version of Picasa for Linux packs in all the features from the recent Windows beta, save one — there’s no slideshow movie feature.

The lack of slideshow movies is due to shortcomings in Wine, which powers Picasa for Linux. But the latest version packs in enough new features to keep most users happy.

The most notable of the changes are vast improvements to the way Picasa integrates with other apps. For instance, it now uses your preferred file manager to show files on disk and can use your default e-mail program to send photos directly from Picasa.

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Samsung will start shipping two ultra-low power desktop PCs soon, the MV100 and the MZ100 Slim Tower. Both will use Intel’s G43 chipset with support for Intel’s Core 2 Duo, Quad and Celeron processors, though exactly which CPUs Samsung will ship the PCs with is unknown. The desktops’ main selling point, however, should prove to be their low power consumption ratings of just 1W while in stand-by mode and 60W while operating in power saving mode.

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The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope was today officially dubbed the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in honor of Nobel prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi. The probe was launched into low-Earth orbit on June 11 to scan the heavens for gamma rays, the most energetic wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.

A new map based on early results from the spacecraft formerly known as GLAST is revealing the probe’s potential for unraveling some of the most perplexing problems in astrophysics.

This high-energy radiation comes from a variety of distant and poorly understood cosmic sources, including neutron stars, supermassive black holes, and powerful events known as gamma ray bursts.

Jon Morse, NASA’s astrophysics division director said, “The new telescope will explore the most extreme environments in the universe,”.

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Nikon today announced world’s first D-SLR with movie function- Nikon D90. This remarkable Nikon camera offers truly cinematic results, stunning image quality and innovative high-performance features inherited from Nikon’s new-generation DX-format flagship D300. The Nikon D90 delivers images with extraordinary detail and expanded enlargement capacity, thanks to its improved DX-format CMOS image sensor and an effective 12.3 megapixels. In a world first for D-SLRs, the D90 offers a movie function, allowing you to shoot HD720p (1,280 x 720 pixels), 640 x 424 pixels or 320 x 216 pixels movies at the professional smoothness of 24 frames per second in motion JPEG format.

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Paul Howse wanted to offer a new definition of luxury and exclusivity with “Enigma.” It’s an electric vehicle that ideally would get its power from the sun, and the passenger compartment uses magnetic levitation to isolate it from the rest of the car.

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Vista is by far not as successful as Microsoft would have hoped and Windows 7 will have to carry the company until a completely new operating system, speculated to be code-named Midori, will be available.
It seems that Microsoft is now confident enough to offer a sneak peek at the new Windows features at its upcoming developer and hardware conferences in October and November. It even set up an official Windows 7 blog on which senior engineers promise to discuss the operating system with users. It is a different approach than what the company took with Vista and appears that the wave of Vista criticism has had an impact.

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