ReadWriteWeb writes "This afternoon Firefox 2 will be 'officially' launched. In anticipation of the unveiling, ReadWriteWeb has a brief interview with Chris Beard — Mozilla Vice President of Products. Subjects discussed include the growing enterprise usage of Firefox, the importance of user experience and security, Mozilla's theory behind Web feeds and why they haven't included an integrated RSS Reader, the growing add-on ecosystem, offline browsing, and finally a little about the future of the browser." From the article: "It felt to us like a 2.0 product, particularly if we looked at it from what 1.0 was, to 2.0. It was like half steps, from 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.0. It's also a very stable and rock solid release - it's really ready for the masses. So it really does feel like a 2, as opposed to a 1.x product. Firefox 2 has, we estimate, between 3-4 times the number of fixes than FF 1.5 did. And that doesn't just include fixes and bugs, but all of the feature work as well as memory, stability and security issues. But there's certainly a lot in it which makes it really solid." Also on the site is a concise review of the product, and an overview of Marketing Firefox 2.0.

eastbayted writes "Google has unveiled a free program called Google Customized Search Engine that lets users tailor a search index to their content specifications, InfoWorld reports. You can select keywords for the index, as well as which Web sites will be included or excluded in the search. You also may customize the look and feel of the engine. The trade-off? When you implement the index on your Web site or blog, it will be populated with Google text ads via Google's lucrative AdSense Program. On the plus side, you do get paid for click-throughs."

Wowzer writes "Blizzard today announced that the release date for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, the first expansion for World of Warcraft, is delayed until January 2007. From the article: 'By adding a few extra weeks to the development cycle beyond its original target date, Blizzard will be able to extend the closed beta test and further refine the new content that will ship with the game.' While disappointing now, what will this mean for the yearly WoW expansions long term? As Blizzard COO Paul Sams revealed plans in August that 'Starting with The Burning Crusade, every year thereafter we plan on bringing out a new expansion set.' 2008, 2009, ad infinitum?"

npwa writes to tell us Reporters Without Borders has released their annual worldwide press freedom index. While developing nations like Haiti and Mauritania continue to gain ground developed nations like France, Japan, and the US continue their downward spiral. From the article: "The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002. Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of 'national security' to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his 'war on terrorism.' The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media's right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism."

CrashPanic writes to tell us TCS Daily has an article entitled "The Next Big Thing" which is about Multiverse. It does a good job of making the case for the evolution to a 3D web through the lens of the past history of Netscape. From the article: "Forces are coalescing that will produce a shift comparable at least to the spread of broadband. This change will have enormous financial, cultural and political repercussions, and the most interesting aspect of the coming transformation is that it will not be some new and unexpected thing. Rather, the Web for many will become the cliched 3D virtual reality that has been so overused as a literary and cinematic devise that most of us have forgotten how compelling that vision was when it first appeared."

mr100percent writes "I'm sure most Slashdot readers remember the computer UI from the Star Trek universe. Now, a number of developers are at work making LCARS themes, including one for Nokia tablets. There's even a Standards Board, with a flash LCARS demo." Several of us here in the office had the opportunity to test out the Nokia 770 at LinuxWorld San Francisco. The "cool factor" of a UI like this may even outweigh some of the downsides to the device since most of them were interface difficulties.

TechDirt has an interesting look at the short history of complaints over meta content delivery and traffic generation. Looking at everything from complaints over Google's Print program to RSS companies delivering ads on someone else's content the article begs the question, where should the line be drawn? One of the examples, Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc., even chimed in as one of the first few comments.

IT Managers Journal is reporting that a Canadian communications student is trying to put a new spin on open source business models. Greg Dean, a student at Simon Fraser University, is attempting to merge the principles of open source with that of a co-op and a regular corporation. From the article: "On the first slide of his presentation, Dean described the ICT/OS as a 'participatory, self-managed workers' business' designed for 'getting the benefits of a corporation through the convivial democracy of a co-op.' Punctuated by dozens of questions, the rest of the presentation explained exactly how he thought this goal could be achieved. In his vision, the co-op would involve three types of members: full members, who are freelancers in high-tech professions and have full voting rights; associated members such as lawyers who provide services to the co-op; and non-members with an investment in the company."

An anonymous reader writes "Ben Hutchings, on behalf of the video team, has announced the availability of this years Debian Conference videos. From the announcement: 'They include all formal sessions from Debian Day and DebConf, plus the group photos, the video team BoF, and some documentary videos made by Gabriella Coleman. The DVD images are now available for download along with the source videos, as are the software and menu design used for them.'"

wayne writes "Microsoft has now put the SenderID patents under the OSP. The Open Specification Promise was discussed on slashdot before in conjunction with web services and it is good to see that they are opening up even more. There are still technical problems with SenderID compared with SPF and, of course, SPF isn't problem free. Still, over the last year, the number of SPF records has more than doubled from around 1.7 million to 4.1 million, with rate of growth increased in the last 6 months."

Looking for an inexpensive notebook at your local discount chain store? Then checkout the Aldi PC , a notebook that includes a 2.0 GHz AMD Turion 64 "MK-36" processor, a Nvidia Geforce 6100 graphics chipset, a DVD burner, 80 GB hard disk space, 512 MB system memory, and Wi-Fi connectivity. Built by Germany-based electronics manufacturer Medion, the notebooks will be offered in the US next week.

CRN was able to sit down with AMD's vice president of global marketing , Pat Moorhead about Windows Vista recently. They touched on such topics as...processor recommendations (Athlon 64 single core at a minimum)...AMD's plans for getting system builders ready for Vista (tools, training, content, and Webinars)...and AMD's relationship with Microsoft ("We are very closely collaborating with Microsoft and there are three special things we're doing. We spoke at a Microsoft system builder Webinar, getting them ready for Vista. We just completed the AMD-Microsoft tech tour in the U.S. and road show for system builders and small retailers to talk about Vista enablement. In the fourth quarter, we're heading out on the road with Microsoft to do a deployment summit for systems integrators and solution providers serving the Fortune 1000.").

AMD has slashed prices of their CPUs in order to shift gears to high volume, low markup sales and compete with Intel - which seems to be paying off. The processors that saw prices cut are the Turion 64 X2, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 and a number of its Sempron chips by up to 35.8%.

Dell has two new servers - the PowerEdge 6950, designed for database applications, server consolidation, and virtualization; and the PowerEdge SC1435 designed for high-performance compute clusters. Both servers are based on AMD's Opteron processor. This is the result of the AMD/Dell effort to match customer needs with AMD and Dell technology.

dptalia writes "China is moving to require people to use their real names when blogging. The proposed solution, arrived at by the Internet Society of China (affiliated with the ministry of information) would allow bloggers to use a pseudonym when blogging as long as they used their real name when registering."