"In a nice break from Google‘s slick-but-cute explanatory videos and ads, someone at Microsoft has unleashed a rather vicious attack video targeting Gmail. The video shows Gmail Man, a delivery guy who has the creepy habit of scanning your mail for keywords and then showing you a related ad. You may be fine with that when you’re online, but when dramatized in real life, it might make you question the practice. If nothing else, the attack video makes a compelling case for going with Office 365 instead."

"It's the last Friday in July. Have you hugged your system administrators today? Bought a cake? Picked up the tab for lunch? There's still time to show your thanks for the unsung heroes who keep corporate desktops, servers and networks running. Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day, an annual event thought up by IT pro Ted Kekatos.

"A recent project here at the Laboratoire de Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Paris (LCMCP) wants to make high-performance scientific computing cheaper by finding new ways to squeeze performance from consumer-grade "gamer" hardware. The idea is nothing less than building the equivalent of a $400,000 custom high performance computing setup for only $40,000.

"The maps in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Battlefield 3 will be a bit smaller and more compact then their PC counter parts. This compromise was necessary in order to yield the best possible experience on the console systems. While the console versions of the maps will be smaller, it is said that the size is roughly 75% to 80% of the original map size. By way of comparison, it has been suggested that the Battlefield Bad Company 2 maps are a good point of reference; and those maps didn’t seem that small at all."

"Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has added streaming movies to its website as the world's largest retailer attempts to grab a bigger share of the online movie market from rival service Netflix Inc.

The decision to offer movie sales and rentals through Walmart.com comes just two weeks after Netflix raised prices for the majority of its customers. The price hike provoked howls of protest from consumers and disappointing subscriber growth projections, leading to a significant drop in Netflix's stock price.

"The worldwide web has made critics of us all. But with commenters able to hide behind a cloak of anonymity, the blog and chatroom have become forums for hatred and bile..."

"Twitter boasts 200 million users and 350 billion tweets per day, and it's a ubiquitous reference on mainstream TV. Visit Twitter today, and it's a hive of frenetic activity. Millions of people rely on the service for news, commentary, blog updates and social interaction. Twitter is about to close an $800 million funding round, which values the company at about $8 billion.

"Mozilla has launched a new project called “Boot to Gecko”. The aim of this project is to develop a complete operating system for the open web. Unlike Google’s version of a web-based OS – the Chrome OS – Mozilla’s version is not aimed at netbooks. With Boot to Gecko, Mozilla is aiming for smartphones – and Android forms a part of their plan."

"Just like video was supposed to have killed the radio star, EA Sports vice president Andrew Wilson is predicting the end of an era in how gamers shop for videogames. The future, he says, is in digital downloads, leaving brick-and-mortar storefronts like GameStop to either adapt and exist solely on the Web, or whither away and die."

"According to the details in the slide, Komodo CPU will feature up to ten Piledriver cores (most likely updated Bulldozer design), will feature Turbo Core 3.0 tech, support for DDR3 memory and will be based on FM2 infrastructure. As far as the Hudson D4 FCH is concerned, this one comes with support for four USB 3.0 ports and eight SATA 6.0Gbps ports. The Corona platform will be rounded up with next gen. AMD discrete graphics.."