Top Items:
Jason Snell / Macworld:
First Look: MacBook and MacBook Pro — A quick hands-on tour of what's new and different in Apple's new laptops — The new MacBook and MacBook Pro are here. No, not just “here” in the sense of “publicly acknowledged by Apple and being shipped to arrive in Apple Stores tomorrow.”
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MacNN:
Analysts: $999 MacBook most significant announcement — The announcement of a $999 plastic MacBook may be more significant than the revelation of metal MacBooks and MacBook Pros, say analysts with UBS and Piper Jaffray. The former firm notes that while the metal notebooks are more attractive …
Mark Hendrickson / TechCrunch:
Who's Afraid of Chrome? Flock 2 Released With Even More Bells And Whistles — Design philosophies could hardly be further apart. Google's ironically named Chrome browser, which launched last month, advanced the notion that browsers ought to be neither seen nor heard.
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Allen Stern / CenterNetworks:Flock Moves 2.0 Browser Release Into Full Public Release
Discussion:
Profy
Mozilla Developer News:
Firefox 3.1 beta 1 now available for download — Please note: Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed.
Discussion:
The Register, Lifehacker, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb, webmonkey, SEO and Tech Daily, TechSpot, Insanely Great Mac and ZDNet.com.au
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Christopher Blizzard / Web Tech Blog:Firefox 3.1 beta 1 - an overview of features for web developers
Ryan Paul / Ars Technica:First look: Firefox 3.1 beta 1 officially released
Discussion:
The Tech Report, Lockergnome Blog Network, Download.com editors, Lifehacker, Gizmodo and digg.com
Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo:
Is Steve Jobs Preparing His Farewell? — Steve Jobs is leaving Apple. Not tomorrow, but probably very soon. That's why he started to say good bye today, doing something more important than just presenting new MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and an updated MacBook Air.
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
First New York Times API is Live - Here's Why it Matters — The much-anticipated first Application Programming Interface (API) from the New York Times went live today, according to a post on the company's blog Open - All the code that's fit to printf(). First up is a campaign finance data API and next is a movie review API.
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Derek Willis / Open:
Announcing the New York Times Campaign Finance API — When we first started talking about creating and releasing APIs for databases collected by The Times, campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission was a natural choice. The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising …
Discussion:
All Points Blog
John Dowdell / jd/adobe:
The thing about Player 10 — Techmeme is covering the press release. I see Adobe Flash Player a little more simply. — It's the world's runtime. It runs across more environments than anything else. When you send it instructions, you know how it will act. — It makes display easy.
Discussion:
Technologizer
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John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Today's Claim Chowder — Let's flag the most egregiously wrong rumor reports from the last few weeks. — DUNCAN RILEY: $800 MACBOOKS — Jackass of the week honors go to Duncan Riley at Inquisitr, who a week ago launched the “$800 laptop from Apple” rumor.
RELATED:
Gartner:
Gartner Says Worldwide PC Market Grew 15 Percent in Third Quarter of 2008 on Strength of Mini-Notebook Shipments; Industry Feeling the Impact of the Economic Crunch — Acer Moves Past HP for Top Position in EMEA Market — Worldwide PC shipments reached 80.6 million units in the third quarter of 2008 …
RELATED:
InfoWorld:
Eclipse offers mobile dev tools — Seeking to establish Eclipse as the standard mobile development platform, the Eclipse Foundation on Wednesday is offering the first major release of its Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java Project (MTJ). — MTJ is a set of plug-ins for the Eclipse IDE offering capabilities …
Matt Rosoff / Digital Noise:
SanDisk's $20 MP3 player — Like many other commentators, I greeted last month's SlotMusic announcement from SanDisk with befuddlement. I don't understand why a consumer would pay $14.99, which is almost the same price as a CD, for a tiny MicroSD card preloaded with digitally compressed audio.
Daniel Terdiman / CNET News:
Amazon, EA, Microsoft, others win ‘Popular Mechanics’ Breakthrough Awards … Popular Mechanics magazine Wednesday night will unveil its “Breakthrough Awards,” the publication's annual celebration of the best and brightest innovators and innovations, and users of the winning choices will be able …
Agence France Presse:
Computer error behind Qantas midair drama — Authorities have blamed a faulty onboard computer system for last week's mid-flight incident on a Qantas flight to Perth. — The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said incorrect information from the faulty computer triggered a series …
Discussion:
Slashdot
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Google Query Growth Strong In September, But Spending Trends Ominous — Two updates on Google's recent trends before the company reports Q3 earnings on Thursday. The first, query growth for the month of September, is a slight positive. The second, an anecdotal report on retail search spending …
Discussion:
Tech Trader Daily
Allen Tom / Yahoo! Developer Network Blog:
Yahoo! Releases OpenID Research — I'm happy to announce that Yahoo! is releasing the results of a usability study that we did for OpenID. Our test subjects were several experienced Yahoo! users (representative of our mainstream audience) who were observed as they tried to sign …
Madison Park / CNN:
Study: Google does a brain good — (CNN) — Can Google make you smarter? Is the more you Yahoo, the better? A new study suggests that searching online could be beneficial for the brain. — A study at the University of California, Los Angeles, measured brain activity of older adults as they searched the Web.
Mike Nash / Windows Vista Team Blog:
Why 7? — There's been a lot of lively discussion since I confirmed yesterday that the official name for the next version of the Window client operating system will be “Windows 7” about how we got to the number “7.” — I'll say up front, that there are many ways to count the releases …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Jive Software Lays Off 1/3 Of Staff — When it comes to layoffs, 1/3 of total staff seems to be a magic number. Portland based Jive Software, which is backed by Sequoia, laid off around 40 people today, a third of their total staff. This follows massive employee growth over the last year.
