Content and news by Rob Williams

We posted last Wednesday that a major overhauled version of Flock was coming, and today will be the day. What’s new is “My World”, a feature that will tell you when your attention-grabbing friends have updated photos and videos, easy posting of your favorite links to del.icio.us and ma.gnolia, updated BlogEditor with Blogger and LiveJournal support, photo uploader and more. If you live in Web 2.0, this browser is a sure-win.

Flock, the Mozilla based web browser still under development in private beta, is getting a nice overhaul with its 0.9 release tomorrow. If you’re not familiar with Flock, it was released in 2005 with much anticipation and hype as the social network browser. Flock was created to integrate various social networks into one browser platform so you could conceivably post items to your blog, update your Facebook page, upload to Flickr and all the while stream YouTube videos.

Source: Download Squad

If this comes as a surprise to you, stand up, walk out of the room, stare at a blank wall and re-evaluate your thinking process. According to Reuters, Q4 will see the launch of a new iPhone that will be based on the slim iPod Nano, which may retail around the $300 price-point. Despite the insane fanboism that follows the iPhone, I think I am more interested in waiting for a Rev. 2 of the original than the Nano, but the size and price may be what sells this up and comer.

Sales of the iPhone are expected to be limited to a small percentage of the market due to its high price tag, particularly in the United States where 85 percent of consumers tend to spend $100 or less on cell phones. But analysts predict that a cheaper phone from Apple, which leads the digital music player market, could pose a much bigger threat to long-established phone makers such as Nokia, Motorola, Samsung Electronics and Sony Ericsson, owned by Sony and Ericsson.

Source: MSNBC

It feels like I just updated to the latest 2.6.21 kernel, but here’s another! Alright, so I upgraded two months ago, but it really does feel like yesterday. 2.6.22 brings on an improved SMP-friendly SLUB allocator, better wireless/firewire stacks, Blackfin architecture, IPV6 optimistic duplicate address detection and a whole whack of other stuff that I have no clue about. So what are you fellow *nix users waiting for? Update!

This wireless stack has many features, like a complete software MAC implementation, WEP, WPA, a “link-layer” bridging module, hostapd, QoS support to prioritize things like VoIP, 802.11g support, and full debug capabilities. All of this comes in a single implementation that drivers can use without rewriting those features themselves, which sadly has been done multiple times in the linux WiFi world.

Source: Kernel Newbies

Sony hasn’t admitted to anything yet, but sources say that the price drop on the PS3 is no joke. The apparent plan is to drop the console to $499, from $599, and then launch an updated console with an 80GB hard drive to fill the $599 spot. I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t touched hardly any of the hard drive space on my PS3, and don’t see 80GB as being a make or break decision. But what if it came with a free copy of Motorstorm?

Oh, and for those of you living in the classic era, Engadget is also reporting that Sony will be launching an updated PS2. Yes, another. The new unit is supposed to weigh only 600g, a rather large drop from the second generations weight of 900g.

Despite denials, Sony has made official the new $499 price point for the PlayStation 3 that we’ve started to see appear in retailers across the US. The 60GB model’s new price point will indeed be $499, with a new 80GB model going on sale for $599 in the US and Canada in August. As a small bonus, the 80GB version will include a “free” copy of MotorStorm.

Source: Engadget

Vista’s first service pack wasn’t due out until later this year, but Mary Jo Foley tells us that we should be expecting it in just a weeks time. Most of the fixes will be performance related, including both the slow file copying and slow shutdown, the latter of which Microsoft claimed to have not existed. If anything, I am hoping SP1 will make the Vista experience a little smoother, and less crash-happy.

Microsoft’s Windows client team, under Director of Windows Engineering Steven Sinofsky, has adopted a much more restrictive information-flow policy. Instead of over-promising and under-delivering, Sinofsky wants the client team to do the opposite. To achieve this, the client team is attempting to institute Apple-like secrecy over anything pertaining to future Windows client directions.

Source: ZD Net

Been hoping for a reliable IM client for your new iPhone? Don’t worry, Cerulean has got you covered. Well, almost. Trillian Astra will be the name of the official client for the phone, but it’s currently in Alpha testing, which you can join here. There is no note about final launch time, but it looks like it’s coming along nicely, so it shouldn’t be too much longer.

Currently the contact list and message windows are up and running. You can see the status of your contacts they update. You can send and receive messages in real-time, as long as your browser window is open. There is no need to move Windows (what a backward concept! :) ) around on the phone, as everything is compact and fit tight to the screen. This beauty is completed with a smooth and true-to-the-pixel user interface done right.

Source: Cerulean Studios

It’s Monday, so there is no excuse for not having an off-beat news posting. Try to take this all in at once: 11-Year-Old steals parents Monte Carlo and gets involved in a chase with the cops. The chase lasted 8 miles and the 11-year-old was going a staggering 100MPH. As if that wasn’t crazy enough, she was also caught under the influence of alcohol. Stranger still, there is a state law in AL that limits the amount of allowed liquor that an underage drinker can have…

With his gun drawn, the officer says he approached the car to find an 11-year-old girl behind the wheel. Sorry, an allegedly drunk, slightly injured 11-year-old girl behind the wheel. Orange Beach assistant police chief Greg Duck wouldn’t say what the girl’s blood alcohol level was, but did say it was higher than the legal limit for adults, .08 grams per milliliter, and much higher than what state law allows for anyone under 21, which is .02 gpm.

Source: Autoblog

If you are a computing enthusiast and own a notebook, the DDR2-667 memory crammed in there probably makes you cringe. The memory is in no way slow, but the desktop standard has been DDR2-800 for quite a while. As far as I know, OCZ are the first to come to market with replacement mobile ram at these speeds, which are offered in both 2GB and 4GB kits. Sadly, we still don’t see the tight 4-4-4 timings as we do on our desktop counterparts, so you will just have to put up with 5-5-5.

Sunnyvale, CA—July 5, 2007—OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory, today released PC2-6400 2GB SODIMM modules, a high-speed addition to their line of premium laptop upgrade memory. These performance memory modules are built to handle the powerful processors and other high-end components of enthusiast and professional notebooks, as well as mainstream consumers looking to add value and performance to their systems.

Source: OCZ Technology Press Release

Apple’s Time Machine for Leopard will likely become a helpful feature to many, very quickly. However, Linux users didn’t have such an application to look forward to, until now. TimeVault will offer similar functionality and currently operates under Debian-based distros. It currently has Nautilus support, which means it’s likely GNOME-specific unless you use Nautilus under KDE or your preferred DE. I cannot wait to see a final release of this.

Inspired by the infamous Time Machine to be bundled in Leopard, TimeVault aims to provide the exact same functionality for Linux. Currently lacking the fancy-pants 3D effects, TimeVault integrates tightly with Nautilus to provide one-click file recovery. TimeVault is a free download for all Debian forks (including Ubuntu), however, tread lightly as it’s still an early alpha.

Source: The Inquirer

Canada doesn’t suck, despite what many love to believe. The Inq has thrown together a Top 10 to show the world what Canada has brought the tech industry. Of course ATI is at top, but other notables are mentioned also, such as Nortel, Corel and… umm. Others. They claim that Canada has terrible beer though, and so the entire article is invalid for anyone who has actually enjoyed a canuck brew. I might be somewhat biased though.

Terrible beer, great people. Waffles and crispy bacon for breakfast. Lots of expats who couldn’t find a job in the cramped quarters of the British Isles. That politician guy Trudeau and his wife. Yup, without even having been there, we like to think we know the land of four strong winds and the maple leaf pretty well.

Source: The Inquirer

It turns out I’m not the only one who finds Vista frustrating. Dell is toning down their sales pitch for the current Windows OS in an attempt to avoid problems that would potentially lie ahead for them. Migration is the biggest issue, since transitions to Vista are not that seamless. Home users who want Vista will not likely run into the headaches that would be awaiting business users.

Overall the challenges will be significant and “should not be underestimated”, added Fitzgerald. However, he still thinks that business should go ahead with the migration and not wait for Microsoft to release its first service pack.

Source: ZDNet

The guys at AnandTech have thrown together a nice guide for those wanting to get into maximizing the performance of their graphics hardware. They go through such tools as RivaTuner, ATITool and nHancer, and even get into details about flashing your GPU’s BIOS. This will all be old news to most enthusiasts, but it’s a great read for those looking to make the ‘enthusiast’ plunge.

Starting off this series, we are taking a look at video card utilities for ATI and NVIDIA’s product lines, dealing with both the first-party utilities included in the drivers along with the third-party utilities developed to replace or augment the first-party utilities.

Source: AnandTech

DailyTech recently reported that Xbox 360 failure rate could be as high as 33%, and Microsoft confirmed that it is indeed a problem by introducing a new three year extended warranty on the console. This is retroactive all the way back to the launch date, so simply three years from the date of purchase. Hopefully by the time the three years is up, they can sell consoles that won’t break so quick.

Microsoft stands behind its products and is taking responsibility to repair or replace any Xbox 360 console that experiences the “three flashing red lights” error message within three years from time of purchase free of charge, including shipping costs. Microsoft will take a $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion pre-tax charge to earnings for the quarter ended June 30, 2007 for anticipated costs under its current and enhanced Xbox 360 policies.

Source: Gamerscore Blog

Is the fact that singles outsell full albums much of a surprise to anyone? This year to date, over 417.3 million tracks have been sold alone… a truly difficult number to grasp. You think such sales would be great for the music industry, but lack of actual album sales isn’t anything to be proud of.

The blame could be put on any number of things. How many times did you bring a new CD home only to figure out that the song that inspired a purchase is the only one worth your time? Too many times, at least in my case. Even still, I regularly buy CD’s and hope to see sales once again increase. That said, every punk fan should pick up the new Bad Religion album, “New Maps of Hell”. I guarantee it’s worth your time. I am biased, but this has been a great year for punk music thus far.

Albums look to be headed into a serious decline, however. In 2006, album sales were also down, but in the same period year-over-year, the shrinkage was only 4 percent. This year’s decline, so far, appears to show a quickening decline, slipping to 15 percent fewer sales.

Source: Ars Technica

We have taken a look at a few Super Talent kits in the past, and more often than not, we’ve been impressed. In fact, the last kit that I got seriously addicted to overclocking was a 2GB PC2-6400 ST kit. Now they have enthusiasts drooling once again with very high-performance DDR3-1600 modules with 7-7-7-18 timings. For comparison, most other companies offering DDR3-1333 kits have the same timing-set, although usually with a 20 tRAS. This killer kit can be all yours for only $650.

Super Talent has a slightly cheaper 2x1GB kit with the W1600UX2G9. The W1600UX2G9 features slightly higher 9-9-9-21 timings and requires 1.8-volts of power. Super Talent prices the W1600UX2G9 modules slightly cheaper at around $598.

Source: DailyTech

The Consumerist recently set up a sting operation to see if Geek Squad ‘officers’ would steal porn from their purposely laced computers. Of course, one agent did steal porn, with video and log files to prove it. What can we gain from this? That getting your PC repaired by a ridiculous establishment is not a wise thing to do. In all fairness to Geek Squad though, they are in no way the only organization who has this kind of thing happen. Still an interesting story nonetheless.

This is not just an isolated incident, according to reports from Geek Squad insiders alleging that Geek Squad techs are stealing porn, images, and music from customer’s computers in California, Texas, New Jersey, Virginia and elsewhere. Our sources say that some Geek Squads have a central server set up where everyone dumps their plunder to share with the other technicians.

Source: Consumerist

It seems that the PS3 has a strong start in AUS, selling upwards of 50,000 units in the first thirteen weeks. But am I reading this right? The price tag is $1,000 AUS? Living in Canada, I sometimes feel our markups are bad, but now I don’t feel half as bad. Though 50K in 13 weeks sounds impressive, by comparison, the Wii sold that many in just 3 weeks, and the Xbox 360 in 6. I’ll just jump to conclusion that the $1,000 is the cause of the slow adoption.

According to the latest GfK figures, in excess of 50,000 PlayStation 3 consoles have now been sold in Australia since the system launched on March 23, 2007. A Sony Computer Entertainment Australia representative commented that “With new and classic titles being made available regularly via the PLAYSTATION Network (PSN), and a strong portfolio of exclusive blu-ray disc based games set to launch over coming months, Sony Computer Entertainment Australia remains confident in the PLAYSTATION 3 console’s current position.”

Source: IGN

The lowly CD-Rom, how far you have come. I had no clue that the history of the compact disc went back into the late 70’s, but it’s no surprise to since it took a while to catch on thanks to early prices. When Blu-ray released its first player, it was $800+, while Sony’s first CD player was $900. At no point in history did it appear smart to be the first to jump on the bandwagon. This article gives a quick walk through the history of the compact disc and is well worth a read. Just take a look at the CD-based Walkman from 1984 for a good chuckle.

Portable CD players were first introduced in the mid 1980s but were not popular until the 1990s when anti-skip technology was introduced. Sony’s first portable CD player, the Discman D-50, was introduced in November 1984. At first, the D-50 was not profitable but as the product gained popularity, it soon became profitable and Sony began to create a portable CD market.

Source: SiliconUser

Despite the fact that Nokia’s N-Gage was considered a huge flop by many, giving up on the name is not in their game plan. They are currently working on a new title that will be playable on not only cell phones, but also the PC. The game has few details, not even a genre is known. However, Scott Foe is heading the project and has worked on many notable projects in the past, including the N-Gage MMO Pocket Kingdom. Can Nokia deliver this time? It’s going to be interesting to see.

While we currently have few details regarding gameplay, we do know that ‘Project White Rock’ possesses over a thousand lines of recorded dialogue. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a role-playing game, though, as our sources indicate otherwise. We’re also told the game’s resolution will remain the same on PC as on mobile; in short, Nokia wants you to have the same experience on both platforms.

Source: Pocket Gamer

Creative has finally released updated software to allow their Audigy series function properly in Windows Vista. The downside is that they are charging $9.99 for it. This can be taken many different ways. Yes, they should support their product, however none of their products denote Windows Vista support. It also has taken a while to get stable drivers working, and programmers are not free. All that aside, NGOHQ has found a workaround for those who don’t want to pony up the cash.

Additionally, the ALchemy Audigy Edition enables sample rate conversion and hardware audio mixing. The software also features an update feature that downloads lists of the latest games supported by ALchemy. Creative Labs currently supports 104 legacy game titles with ALchemy. Supported titles include Command & Conquer 3, F.E.A.R., Far Cry, Guild Wars, Oblivion, World of Warcraft and others.

Source: DailyTech