Latest Software News

NVIDIA have released new WHQL drivers slightly newer than the beta drivers they released last month. The drivers are the first non-beta release of the 275 release and are recommended for all users! They have the following changes since the previous beta release:

Everybody chuckled when Tellme, a mobile voice company snapped up by Microsoft almost two years ago, released its smartphone voice search application for BlackBerry, instead of for Windows Mobile. Thanks to a new native application that will be released on Windows Mobile 6.5 phones this coming fall, the ribbing may entirely subside.

On Wednesday, Tellme announced the application's features and its shipping plan. Like rival voice services for smartphones, you click a hardware hotkey to initiate the program's digital ears, and from there you can begin a search, call a number, or dictate a text message. This last feature will be new to Tellme's Windows Mobile app.

Microsoft tickled our meta-OS fancies last week by talking up the virtualized version of Windows XP included with Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate Edition. However, the company has now revealed that ponying up for one of the top tiers of the OS will not be the only requirement. 2GB of RAM will be needed, which isn't such a big deal, but more troubling is the requirement of a CPU that sports chip-level virtualization support.

Both AMD and Intel have been quick to add features to support enterprises turning to virtualized hosting environments, but rather annoyingly neither of those companies make it particularly easy to tell which of their chips provide such support.

Expected last week, the fourth and final beta version of Firefox 3.5 (previously known as FF 3.1) has now been released by Mozilla. Based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, the browser features:

- Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
- Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
- Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
- Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
- Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 and elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

The Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is available in 70 languages and can be downloaded from this page.