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Mozilla has launched a public prototype of the Firefox add-on Ubiquity, a very interesting command-based interface that provides an easy way to pull and send data to various online services. For example, users will be able to pull up maps and embed them into emails, translate text, perform searches, lookup words in the dictionary, check the weather, update their Twitter, Digg sites and much more – all using a few keystrokes and without leaving the page they happen to be on. Think Launchy meets web 2.0.

In a video demonstration posted after the jump, Mozilla’s Aza Raskin shows among other things how someone inviting a friend to a restaurant could use Ubiquity to find the location map of the restaurant, edit it and insert it in an email. By typing “yelp” and the name of the restaurant, he could add reviews of the restaurant right into the message.

Lots of commands are available by default, but users can also create their own to interact with pretty much any service that offers an open web API. The official website contains examples, a command list, and information about creating your own commands. I really recommend checking it out.

Linux has always been better received in the server market than the desktop market, where it's compatibility with UNIX and POSIX-compliance has made it a great fit for companies who aren't about to shell out for UNIX licensing. The past year along has seen significant Linux server growth, which now accounts for over 13% of the market.

They share this with many top players, including Microsoft, who has more than a third of the total market. While UNIX-like operating systems still make up the lion's share of all servers active in the world, vendors who support and sell Linux will likely have to find new ways to erode Microsoft market share rather than others, or they risk stalling growth.

IBM remains the number one vendor for selling servers, selling significantly more than HP, Sun, Dell and others.

You may remember little over a month ago Nvidia and Intel finally came to an agreement that would enable SLI configurations on some X58 boards via an nForce 200 bridging chip, though motherboard makers weren’t too fond of the solution because it added to the cost and complexity of their products. Thus, at the Nvision event in California, the graphics company has outlined another plan to stop ATI’s CrossFire from stealing the limelight.

Specifically, Nvidia has decided to open up the SLI technology to all X58 motherboards – provided that they meet certain requirements and, of course, pay a licensing fee. Native licensing will not require the use of Nvidia's nForce 200 chips and thereby the company hopes to broaden the range of its graphics offerings on Intel’s next high-end desktop platform.

There’s a slight catch, though. Only boards carrying an nForce 200 bridging chip will be able to support three-way and four-way SLI at the highest bandwidth possible, while the new licensed native SLI setup on X58 boards is limited to a standard two-way SLI via two PCIe x16 slots, or three and four-way configurations with one x16 and two x8s or four x8s. Nevertheless, Nvidia’s new position towards SLI support by third parties’ chipsets is great news for gamers and a step in the right direction for a more open ecosystem.

It's not a secret, nor a surprise that laptop sales are soaring. People are constantly on the move and there is an ever increasing demand for their PCs to be equally mobile.

Just as purchasing a new desktop can feel overwhelming to the untrained eye, buying a new laptop tailored to your specific needs whilst remaining cost effective can seem virtually impossible with the sea of potential component combinations. Realizing this, we have analyzed the market and assembled a number of specification tables outlining the ideal components for the most in demand system types today:

• Desktop replacement notebooks
• Ultra-portable laptops
• Budget/Value-minded laptops

Although a large population of users have already migrated away from Internet Explorer, Microsoft Windows' built-in browser still dominates at large, for better or for worse. Its latest iteration, IE7 is still a very decent browser although with more recent releases of Firefox, Opera and Safari, Microsoft has once again fell behind in terms of features, customization and perhaps most importantly, performance.

The software giant has been touting all year long the progress they have been making with Internet Explorer 8, however with their latest beta 1 release they demonstrated they were far from reaching the stability and usability point where you can actually use the browser as your primary navigation tool. Even worse, it tended to break many many sites.

The IE development team announced today on their blog the public release of IE8 Beta 2. The browser is available for 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, XP, Windows Server 2003, and Server 2008. There is a long list of improved and added features on the Beta 2 which you can see here. In short, the development team claims this version of the browser is now ready for public consumption as long as you can live with the occasional yet mandatory bug you will find on non-final code.

If you are anything like us and enjoy tinkering with new browsers just for the fun of it, go grab a look.

Far Cry 2 isn’t even out yet, but a third installment of the franchise is already said to be in early development. Speaking at the Leipzig Games Convention, Ubisoft’s Patrick Redding confirmed that the game is in the “preliminary stages” and briefly discussed a possible setting for Far Cry 3.

Apparently, the team fell in love with Africa and wishes to further explore it in the new title. Redding explained that while the Far Cry 2 engine is flexible enough to handle other environments, sticking with the African setting in further games is likely to “save time.” It’s way too early to speculate but hopefully that saved time will allow them to work on the narrative and new gameplay elements.

In the meantime, however, fans of the series already have a game to look forward to, as Far Cry 2 is expected to debut sometime this fall on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

Klausner Technologies, a patent-holding company that has won settlements from a number of companies, is continuing its litigious ways. The company has filed a new lawsuit against Google, LG, Verizon and six other firms for allegedly violating patents related to visual voicemail.

Each of the companies being sued currently implements some form of visual voicemail, including Google with its Google Talk Voicemail feature and a recently unveiled service from Verizon that works on the LG Voyager and other phones. Anticipating the attack, however, Verizon filed its own lawsuit against Klausner two weeks ago seeking to have a federal judge declare the visual voicemail patent invalid.

Klausner Technologies hasn't revealed the amount of damages they are seeking in the suit; but when filing a similar suit against Skype, Comcast, Apple, and others last year, they demanded as much as $360 million in collective damages.

As digital cameras continue to capture higher-quality images and videos, the need for faster and larger capacity flash memory cards that can keep up with that kind of pace is also getting bigger. With this in mind SanDisk has introduced the latest addition to its SDHC line, the SanDisk Extreme III 30MB/s Edition.

Available worldwide starting in September, the cards offer a 50 percent speed boost from today’s top-end 20MB/s cards, which will be particularly good for those fast DSLRs cameras. According to the company, they'll be able to handle 39 images in continuous shooting mode at 4.5 frames a second. The new cards will come in 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB variants, along with $65, $110, and $180 price tags respectively.

Dell is hoping to find some new customers in growing global markets. The company recently unveiled four low-cost computer models made specifically to meet the needs of small and medium-size enterprises, governments, and educational institutions in 20 countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The new products fall under the Vostro line – two laptops and two desktops – which center on affordability and ease of maintenance, according to the company. The new Vostro notebooks will start at $480, while the desktops start at $440. Dell is already selling some of its computers abroad, but this latest move shows how their focus has shifted to designing products exclusively for emerging markets – which are growing at about 10 times the U.S. rate.

Little people victories over the RIAA usually make me happy. Losses not so much, though sometimes people can make some pretty serious mistakes. A man who had been fighting the RIAA and actually was doing well in court has now lost, with the Judge giving an automatic victory to the RIAA. The reason? While the case was under way he decided to wipe his hard drive. His actions bring to end nearly two years of fighting in the courts.

The Judge felt that by wiping the hard drive in question, he was destroying evidence. Even if the man had a real reason for wiping his machine – many of us do that several times a year – it was still a poor choice at this point in time. All things being equal, he shouldn't have even been using the machine. It definitely ruined his case.

At the very least, it serves as a warning to others who the RIAA is trying to strong-arm – don't destroy your hardware or wipe your drives, even if it has nothing to do with them.

Microsoft is expanding the scope of their Windows Genuine Advantage software, which as many of us know tries to reduce the number of pirated copies of Windows in the world. This latest update targets Windows XP, and makes it more similar to the version of WGA found in Windows Vista.

The latest update goes a bit beyond the frequent reminder messages that tell you your OS is pirated. This time, the update will automatically change your desktop background to a plain black, overlaid with a WGA warning – similar to the login screen change they added to XP a while back. This time, however, if you change the background, WGA will just change it back.

This is a pretty bold move by Microsoft, who has faced a considerable amount of criticism for introducing WGA in the first place. They also faced numerous teething issues with it, with estimates at one point claiming that up to 42% of the installs identified as being pirated were false positives.

Nagging someone with alerts when they had a legal copy was bad enough, but what if someone is falsely identified and then subject to having their OS toyed with by Microsoft? Hopefully they have fixed those problems by now.

Apple got a slap on the wrist in the U.K. recently, after the “Advertising Standards Authority” decided to pull an ad for the iPhone 3G. While it is one thing for users to be upset over feeling misled, it's another thing for it to be such a problem that the government steps in and decides your ad is a falsehood. The ASA concluded that due to the iPhone 3G not supporting Flash and Java, the advertisements Apple created showing off the iPhone's web-surfing prowess weren't true to reality.

Nobody, I'd hope, is really surprised that a product shown on TV didn't perform quite the same once in your hands, but I suppose this is a fairer way of going about it than hurling lawsuits at Apple. There has been both Java and [urlhttp://www.gearlive.com/news/article/q108-flash-on-iphone-is-just-around-the-corner/]Flash[/url] for the iPhone in the works for a while, though some people at Apple don't want that. It's sure to happen eventually, but having an ad pulled is still a strong message to Apple.

Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole @ Wired
Brazil: Digital inclusion, but how? @ News.com
Bank details sold on eBay @ The Independent
GT5P Pod - A pricey toy to chase speeding obsession @ BornRich
See more articles and reviews.

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MSI has begun pushing accessories for their very new Wind netbook, with the introduction of an external optical drive. The drive is designed, aesthetically, to match the Wind, along with being a fairly small drive in general. From a technical standpoint it's not particularly special, offering the same features that just about any CD/DVD combo drive would. It can read and write CDs, DVDs, Dual-layer DVDs and other formats as well. One advantage is the lack of an external power adapter, which helps maintain the “liteness” and clean feel of the MSI Wind.

The drive will be available in a few weeks. There's no mention if MSI has plans to introduce an external Blu-ray drive as well.

Nintendo is celebrating a milestone with Wii sales, as the console recently managed to break one million units sold – in Canada. While Nintendo's worldwide sales of the Wii are around the 23 million mark, having over a million sold in Canada is encouraging to Nintendo and the future of the Wii. Canada has a population just under 34 million, so you can assume that one out of every 34 Canadians now owns a Wii.

That's a pretty good ratio, and has the Wii one-upping the PS3 and Xbox 360 in Canada still. It also demonstrates a considerable growth in gaming adoption in Canada. These sales figures are a welcome bit of good news for the company, as opposed to the discovery last week that Nintendo was once again getting sued over their incredibly popular console.