Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky said in a blog on Wednesday that there will be two versions of Internet Explorer 10: a full-blown desktop app that will support extensions and plug-ins including Flash, and a Metro-style app that will be completely plug-in free, relying on HTML5. That means it will not support Adobe’s “legacy” technology by default.

“For the web to move forward and for consumers to get the most out of touch-first browsing, the Metro style browser in Windows 8 is as HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free,” added IE team leader Dean Hachamovitch. “The experience that plug-ins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 web.”

According to Hachamovitch, running the Metro version without plug-ins will mean an improved battery life, better security, reliability and privacy for users. And now that the Internet has advanced to sustaining an HTML5 environment, supporting legacy plug-in technologies would simply detract from the consumer experience. In fact. plug-in free HTML5-based mobile sites are becoming more common — just look at Google’s Music Beta and the mobile sites for Twitter and Facebook.

“We examined the use of plug-ins across the top 97,000 sites world-wide, a corpus which includes local sites outside the US in significant depth,” Hachamovitch said. “Many of the 62-percent of these sites that currently use Adobe Flash already fall back to HTML5 video in the absence of plug-in support. When serving ads in the absence of plug-ins, most sites already perform the equivalent of this fallback, showing that this approach is practical and scalable. There’s a steep drop-off in plug-in usage after Flash, with one control used on 2-percent of sites and a small collection of controls used on between 0.5-percent and 0.75-percent of sites.”

Yet given that the Metro version of Internet Explorer 10 will be pushed as a “plug-in free experience,” it will still support old-school consumer sites and “line of business” applications that require legacy ActiveX controls. Users simply tap “Use Desktop View” in Metro style IE to access these sites in their entirety. “For what these sites do, the power of HTML5 makes more sense, especially in Windows 8 apps,” he added.

To see how Internet Explorer 10 will adjust its behavior site by site, head here.

We noticed that the client landed in 42 translations about a week ago and seems to be ready to launch. What we don’t know yet is what this feature will actually do. There are guesses, for example, that remoting will enable Chrome users to connect to enterprise apps from anywhere and anytime.

Host remoting surfaced in Chrome about a year ago in Chrome 7 and there has not much news since then and we are left with the notion that host remoting typically enables applications to provide certain features or services to other clients on a network. It’s a pretty safe bet that this feature will affect the distribution of apps and services over a network in one way or the other.

And since we are already talking about mysterious features in Chrome, we should also mention the Aura window manager that has been popping up in Chrome occasionally since this past spring. You can launch a recent Chromium 16 version with the -views-desktop switch and the Aura desktop will appear as a simple, non-functional window, which could point to a full-screen desktop – but that is a wild guess. Google’s Chrome revision log does not provide any clues what Aura could be, so we will have to wait and see.

SOURCE via Google

File hosting service Hotfile has sued Warner Bros. for abusing its anti-piracy tool. TorrentFreak reports that Warner Bros. apparently removed “hundreds of titles” from Hotfile, even if they did not hold the copyrights to them. The deleted files include game demos and open source software, the file host said.

Hotfile, which was sued for copyright infringement by five members of the MPAA earlier this year, alleges that Warner Bros. has violated the DMCA and lists intentional interference with a contractual or business relationship and negligence as second and third counts in its suit.

“The single file deleted by Warner that had been most frequently downloaded by Hotfile users—five times more frequently than any other file—was a freeware software title wrongfully deleted by Warner,” the suit states. “The software publisher that uploaded the file used Hotfile.com as a means for distribution of its open source software. Warner was not authorized by the software publisher to delete the file.”

Hotfile speculates that the takedowns had an economic motive as an agreement between Warner Bros. and Hotfile allows the movie studio to replace content that was taken down with a link to Warner Bros. content that can be purchased. The more content Warner removed, the more links it was able to place. Warner Bros has not commented on the new suit.

SOURCE via Torrentfreak

NASA said that SLS will provide a safe, affordable and sustainable technology to carry the Orion spacecraft into space. The SLS will also serve as backup for commercial and international partner transportation services to the International Space Station (ISS).

According to NASA, SLS will combine features from the Space Shuttle as well as the Constellation program. The device will be using a liquid oxygen propulsion system that will be built from the Space Shuttle’s RS-25D/E core stage as well as the new J-2X engine. The total lift capacity initially will be 70 metric tons, or about 154,000 pounds. NASA believes that the capacity can be expanded to 130 metric tons in the future. The first flight is targeted for late 2017.

“NASA has been making steady progress toward realizing the president’s goal of deep space exploration, while doing so in a more affordable way,” NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said. “We have been driving down the costs on the Space Launch System and Orion contracts by adopting new ways of doing business and project hundreds of millions of dollars of savings each year.”

SLS is designed as NASA’s first new “space exploration-class” system since the Saturn V took astronauts to the moon more than 40 years ago. NASA hopes that SLS will enable it to explore “near-Earth asteroids, Mars and its moons and beyond.”

SOURCE via NASA

Stephen Reid, BioWare’s senior online community manager for Star Wars: The Old Republic, recently stated that “same gender romances with companion characters” will be added after the MMOG launches at the end of the year.

That’s a seemingly 180-degree turn after the MMO’s producer Cory Butler previously confirmed that the relationships will not be available to players. Even community manager Sean Dahlberg saidthat the terms “gay” and “lesbian” do not exist in the Star Wars universe. “As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars. Thread closed,” Dahlberg stated.

But according to Reid, same gender romances with companion characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic will be a post-launch feature.

Read more…

When it comes to objects of automotive lust, few tip the scales further than the Lamborghini Aventador. Naturally, most mere mortals (like us) can’t come up with nearly enough expendable income to ever fulfil the dream of owning an actual, drivable toy like that.

If we can’t afford the real thing, at least we can get ourselves a smaller scale model, right? Well, maybe… unless the 1:8 scale Aventador you’ve got your eye on comes with seats, headlights and steering wheel made from diamonds, wheels fashioned from gold and platinum and a perfectly scaled copy of the body crafted from carbon fiber. Yes, this is not your typical Shell Ferrari diecast toys.

Read more…

Judging from the covert screenshot you see above, it most certainly seems like a legit shot. A tipster tipped Engadget this very convincing screenshot, from AT&T’s internal system, listing the “iPhone 4s White” beneath a handful of already familiar Apple handsets. Could it be? Is Cupertino actually planning on bringing a white version of its next iPhone out at launch? Only time will tell, which is only about a month’s time anyway.

SOURCE via Engadget