Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware

For all my Programmer friends
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/facebook_hip_hop_performance_improvement/
 

When Facebook moved its servers to HipHop for PHP – the code transformer it built to convert PHP into optimized C++ – the company's average CPU usage dropped by 50 per cent. And after six months of additional engineering, the tool was about 1.8 times faster.

Now, after another six months, the company says, it has improved performance another 1.7 times. But this is more than just self congratulation. The project is open source, and it's been open since Facebook first switched its servers to HipHop in February 2010.

Unlike Google, you see, Facebook has been known to promptly open source some of the most important pieces of its back-end infrastructure.

With a Wednesday blog post, Facebook research scientist Xin Qi charts HipHop's relative throughput improvement over the last six months:

The end result, he says, is that HipHop can handle about 70 per cent more traffic on the same hardware infrastructure.

After transforming PHP into C++, HipHop compiles the code and builds binary files with the GNU C++ compiler, aka g++. The idea is that you can still code with high-level PHP, but then get the performance of C++ – though it does give up certain "rarely used" PHP features.

According to Qi, Facebook and the open source community have juiced the tool in several different ways. HipHop uses a version of the Alternative PHP Cache (APC), and engineers have stripped most of the serialization and unserialization operations. "Semantically, an object is serialized and unserialized when it is stored into and fetched from APC. However, serialization and unserialization are costly operations, commonly dominating the cost of APC data fetching itself," Qi says.

"Thus, we reworked the APC implementation in HipHop, getting rid of almost all the serialization/unserialization operations, while keeping the semantics equivalent to before."
But some serialization is still required, and this has been fine tuned. "Objects still need to be serialized or JSON-encoded in order to transfer them over the wire. To make things faster, we optimized various aspects of these operations, including UTF8/UTF16 conversions, object property accesses, number parsing, and so forth."

Facebook has also reduced the size of the binary code, improved memory allocation, and made several changes to the compiler. "Several phases in the compiler, including parsing, optimization, and code generation, are now parallelized. Hyves contributed changes to the generated C++ code to make it compile faster without losing any run-time efficiency," Qi says.
His crew can build a more than 1GB in about 15 minutes (after stripping out debug information). "Although faster compilation does not directly contribute to run-time efficiency," Qi says "it helps make the deployment process better."

The likes of Drupal, MediaWiki, and WordPress are now using HipHop. No one is using BigTable or the Second Coming of the Google File System. Except for Google. ®

Mozilla Engineer Calls IE9 Launch Miserable & Starts Abusing When Asked For Stats

One of the best analogy of IE9 and Mozilla..
Source: http://techie-buzz.com/tech-news/mozilla-engineer-calls-ie9-launch-miserable-starts-abusing-when-asked-for-stats.html
Written by:Manan Kakkar

If there’s something that ticks me off the most, it is the marketing/PR of a company fudging statistics to suit their needs. Both Microsoft and Mozilla announced new versions of the browsers this month and number of downloads in the first 24 hours were used to showcase how awesome the browsers are.
Microsoft did a blog post claiming 2.35 Million downloads for IE9 and Mozilla announced 7.1 Million downloads. Woah! That’s a huge difference! I mean really that’s almost 3 times but. Yes, there’s a capital BUT here. IE9 is only for Windows Vista and Windows 7 whereas Firefox is available for all desktop operating systems. This little piece of information has been conveniently skipped by all. Why IE9 is not available on Windows XP is Microsoft’s decision, they’ve talked about that and I shall not get into that since it has nothing to do with the download numbers.
Today Romit Mehta asked Asa Dotzler if he could share OS specific numbers for the downloads since that would give a clearer picture as to who “won” if the first 24 hour download numbers were the scale. The discussion had several analogies exchanged but Asa did not talk numbers, much like a PR professional he danced around but not being one he lost his cool and shit hit the roof. Here are some quotes:


Since I follow @Rawmeet and these statistics have been something of an issue for me since everyone started talking about them, I jumped into the discussion and here’s how that went:

Getting a PR response meant I had to take a dig at Mozilla:

I just got complimented by Asa for my persistence (and my blunt truth):

With that done, I decided to look at numbers. They weren’t going to come from Asa or Mozilla so the next best public source, Statscounter and here’s what I found:
The 28 days of March 2011

• Windows Vista – 13.74%
• Windows 7 – 30.63%
• Total download base for IE9 = 44.47% (2.35 Million Times)
• Compared to the 100% marketshare Firefox had, they managed 7.1 Million downloads.
• This is 55.53% more and they got 3 times the downloads.

Windows XP has 47.22% of the marketshare which means if IE9 were available on Windows XP the download numbers would’ve well been close. Or in other words, Firefox 4 didn’t exactly do a hell lot better than IE9 despite the 3x downloads.

So much for the BS Mozilla and you might want to get your engineers some anger management therapy. Maybe the congratulatory cake Microsoft sent Mozilla wasn’t his favourite flavour.

Is It a New Tech Bubble?

Banks pouring money into technology funds, wealthy clients and institutions clamoring to get pieces of start-ups, expectations of stock market debuts building — as Wall Street’s machinery kicks into second gear, some investors with memories of the Internet bust a decade earlier are wondering whether this sudden burst of activity spells danger for the industry once again.

With all this exuberance, valuations are soaring. Investments in Facebook and Zynga have more than quintupled the implied worth of each company in the last two years. The social shopping site Groupon is said to be considering an initial public offering that would value the company at $25 billion. Less than a year ago, the company was valued at $1.4 billion.

“I worry that investors think every social company will be as good as Facebook,” said Roger McNamee, a managing director of Elevation Partners and an investor in Facebook, who co-founded the private equity fund Silver Lake Partners in 1999 at the height of the boom. “You have an attractive set of companies right now, but it would be surprising if the next wave of social companies had as much impact as the first.”

Funds set up by Goldman and JPMorgan Chase have invested in Internet start-ups like Facebook and Twitter or in funds with stakes in those start-ups. Even the mutual fund giants Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price have stepped up their efforts, placing large bets on companies like Groupon and Zynga.

Thomas Weisel, founder of an investment bank called the Thomas Weisel Partners Group that prospered in the first Internet boom, says he is “astounded” by the amount of money now flooding the markets.

“I think it’s much greater today,” he said. “The pools of capital that are looking at these Internet companies are far greater today than what you had in 2000.”

Yet there are notable differences between the turn-of-the-century dot-com boom and now. For one, the stock market is not glutted with offerings. In 1999, there were 308 technology I.P.O.’s, making up about half of that year’s offerings, according to data from Morgan Stanley. In 2010, there were just 20 technology I.P.O.’s, based on Thomson Reuters data.

More important, the tech start-ups that have attracted so much interest from investors have real businesses — not just eyeballs and clicks. Companies like Facebook have fast-growing revenue. Groupon, which has been profitable since June 2009, is on track to take in billions in revenue this year. And since 1999, when 248 million people were online (less than 5 percent of the world’s population), broadband Internet and personal computing have become mainstream. About one in three people are online, or roughly two billion users, according to data from Internet World Stats, a Web site that compiles such numbers.

“In those days, you had tiny, little companies going public that hardly had a business plan,” Stefan Nagel, associate finance professor at Stanford University, said. “And now you’re talking about only a few companies — companies that are already global and with revenue.”

With such a small, elite group, the potential fallout if things go badly would be limited, some investors say. “Yes, we have a frenzy again,” said Lise Buyer, a principal of the Class V Group, an advisory firm for companies considering initial public offerings. “But the frenzy is on a very select group of companies. Facebook is clearly Secretariat, but there are a few other championship horses they are looking to bet on.”
Article Tools

For Wall Street, the initial attraction to Internet start-ups in the 1990s was the opportunity to earn fees from taking the companies to market. At its peak in 1999, the industry made $1.3 billion in underwriting fees, according to data from Thomson Reuters.

But as enthusiasm surged, many firms also rushed to make investments for their clients and themselves through special-purpose funds and direct investments. And in many cases the banks got burned just as ordinary investors did.

“The investment pools that we did back in 2000 did extremely poorly, because many of those companies went from filing an I.P.O. to bankruptcy courts in a matter of months,” said Mr. Weisel, whose firm was acquired by Stifel Financial last year.

In 1998, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, the bank’s private equity arm, began a new, $2.8 billion fund largely geared toward Internet stocks. Before that fund, the group had made fewer than three dozen investments in the technology and communications sectors from 1992 to mid-1998, according to Goldman Sachs documents about the fund.

But between 1999 and 2000, the new fund made 56 technology-related investments, of about $27 million on average. In aggregate, the fund made $1.7 billion in technology investments — and lost about 40 percent of that after the bubble burst. (The group, which manages the money of pensions, sovereign wealth funds and other prominent clients, declined the opportunity to invest in Facebook early this year.)

Philip A. Cooper, who in 1999 was head of a separate Goldman Sachs group that managed fund of funds and other investments, recalled that investors were clamoring, “We want more tech, we want more.” Bowing to pressure, he created a $900 million technology-centric fund in 1999, and within eight weeks he had nearly $2 billion in orders. Despite the frenzy, he kept the cap at $900 million.

“There was a lot of demand, but we couldn’t see any way we could prudently put that much capital to work,” said Mr. Cooper, who has since left Goldman.

Other Wall Street firms, including JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, also made a number of small to midsize investments during the period. In 1999, for instance, Morgan Stanley joined Goldman Sachs and others in a $280 million investment in CarsDirect.com, which scrapped its initial plans to go public when the market deteriorated.

“We thought we were going to double our money in just a couple of weeks,” said Howard Lindzon, a hedge fund manager of Lindzon Capital Partners and former CarsDirect.com investor. “No one did any due diligence.” Mr. Lindzon lost more than $200,000 on his investment.

Also in 1999, Chase Capital Partners (which would later become part of JPMorgan Chase) invested in Kozmo.com — an online delivery service that raised hundreds of millions in venture funding. JPMorgan Chase, which just recently raised $1.2 billion for a new technology fund, at the time called Kozmo.com “an essential resource to consumers.” At its height, the company’s sprawling network of orange bike messengers employed more than a thousand people. Less than two years later, it ceased operations.

An online grocer, Webvan, was one of the most highly anticipated I.P.O.’s of the dot-com era. The business had raised nearly $1 billion in start-up capital from institutions like Softbank of Japan, Sequoia Capital and Goldman Sachs. Goldman, its lead underwriter, invested about $100 million.

On its first day, investors cheered as Webvan’s market value soared, rising 65 percent to about $8 billion at the close. Less than two years later, Webvan was bankrupt.

About the same time, Internet-centric mutual funds burst onto the scene. From just a handful in early 1999, there were more than 40 by the following year. One fund, the Merrill Lynch Internet Strategies fund, made its debut in late March 2000 — near the market’s peak — with $1.1 billion in assets. About one year later, the fund, with returns down about 70 percent, was closed and folded into another fund.

“We all piled into things that were considered hot and sexy,” said Paul Meeks, who was the fund’s portfolio manager. Mr. Meeks started six tech funds for Merrill Lynch from 1998 to 2000.

Today, the collective amount of money that Wall Street banks are pumping into Internet start-ups, on top of the surging cash piles from venture capital groups, hedge funds and private equity, is a major concern for some investors.

Over the last five months, many venture capital players have raised giant amounts of capital. One Facebook investor, Accel Partners, is about to raise $2 billion for investments in China and the United States, while Bessemer Venture Partners is said to be closing in on $1.5 billion for a new fund. Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have collectively raised more than $3 billion in the last six months.

Mr. Weisel, who has also been tracking hedge fund activity, finds the numbers dizzying. Countless hedge funds are investing in private placements — “dozens and dozens of hedge funds are doing the same thing,” he said.

As cash continues to pile up, the fear is that all this money cannot be put to work responsibly. With only a few perceived “winners,” some investors must be choosing losers or paying too much, Mr. Meeks said.

“When you see the valuations being bandied about — I do think, boy, these better be really special companies.”

Source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/is-it-a-new-tech-bubble-lets-see-if-it-pops/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Digg.com’s Algorithm CRACKED!

 

credit: http://imgur.com/pgRtk

Firefox 4 surpasses IE 9 total downloads in 24 hours

Firefox may be under pressure to face severe competition from Internet Explorer 9, "The best experience of the Web is on Windows with Internet Explorer 9," said Dean Hachamovitch… but with more than twice the downloads in its first day, Firefox 4 soared over its rival by one measurement Wednesday.

Firefox 4 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in more than 80 languages. Firefox 4 will also be available on Android and Maemo devices soon.

Comparing Microsoft’s most downloaded beta IE-9 browser with 40 million downloads; Firefox 4 cleared 4.7 million, according to the Mozilla Glow site that logs downloads.

What’s New in Firefox 4:
Fastest Firefox Ever

• Performance: Firefox is up to six times faster than the previous release. With improved start-up and page load times, speedy Web app performance and hardware accelerated graphics; Firefox is optimized for rich, interactive websites.

Streamlined Interface

• App Tabs: give a permanent home to frequently visited sites like Web mail, Twitter, Pandora, Flickr.
• Switch to Tab: easily find and switch to any open tab from your Awesome Bar without opening duplicate tabs.
• Panorama: drag and drop tabs into manageable groups to save time while navigating many open tabs.

Private and Secure Synchronization

• Firefox Sync: access your Awesome Bar history, bookmarks, open tabs, passwords and form data across multiple computers and mobile devices.

Most Customizable

• New Add-ons Manager: easily discover and install more than 200,000 add-ons to customize the features, functionality and look of Firefox.

Private and Secure

• Do Not Track: Firefox is leading the Web towards a universal standard Do Not Track feature that allows users to opt-out of tracking used for behavioral advertising.
• Firefox puts privacy first, fixing flaws in some Web standards to prevent others from accessing your browser history.
• HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS): automatically establishes secure connections to stop “man in the middle” attacks and keep sensitive data safe from interception during the log-in process.
• Content Security Policy (CSP): prevent cross-scripting attacks by allowing sites to explicitly tell the browser which content is legitimate.

Cutting Edge Tools for Web Developers:

• The JavaScript engine incorporates the new JägerMonkey JIT compiler, along with enhancements to the existing TraceMonkey JIT and SpiderMonkey’s interpreter for faster page-load speed and better performance of Web apps and games.
• HTML5 support in Firefox includes hardware accelerated, high-definition video (WebM), 3D graphics, offline data storage, professional typography, touchscreen interfaces and the Mozilla Audio API to help create visual experiences for sound and more.
• Firefox 4 also improves existing tools like CSS, Canvas and SVG to enable developers to make exciting Web pages.
• Firefox provides uninterrupted browsing when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins. If one of these plugins crashes or freezes, it won’t affect the rest of Firefox. Simply reload the page to restart the plugin.

Mozilla is hoping that with Firefox 4, they will increase there user base but as a percentage of worldwide browser use it's lost share to Chrome, which now accounts for more than 10 percent of usage worldwide.

Top 10 Mac Software

                                                      1.) Adium

Adium has support for pretty much every instant messenger protocol out there Google Talk to Twitter to Facebook chat to even IRC. Presentation is excellent. It might be just an instant messenger, but it’s the mother of all instant messengers and it just happens to be on the Mac. Even the meanest of Apple critics have a soft spot for this cute little messenger.

2.) Quicksilver

This one is a most have for Mac keyboard warriors. Quicksilver is an app that allows users to quickly complete tasks without having to click through several menus and windows. It can also be used to quickly search through important locations. Plugins only make this app more powerful. Similar software for other platforms were influenced by Quicksilver’s approach.

3.) Transmission
Even Mac OS X users love to download. One of the few Bitorrent clients to be made for the Mac OS X has been Transmission. It’s popular on Linux, but it’s popularity has spread to Mac OS X and also to other devices especially NAS and download boxes.

4.) Handbrake
One of the easy-to-use media transcoder out there. It’s specially designed to quickly convert your videos in to H.264 content. It’s highly multithreaded for performance too.

5.) Growl
Growl is a desktop notification application that shows alerts and notifications for events to do with applications on your system. For example, you’ll receive a popup when a download is completed or when your connect a flash drive to your PC. The great thing is that it’s highly customisable and has supports a wide range of software.

6.) Firefox
Firefox’s fire has spread to the Mac OS X. A lot of users prefer to use Firefox as their primary browser over Safari. Extension support means there are endless possibilities. A must-try if you haven’t used it yet.

7.) The Unarchiver
The Unarchiver is the OS X alternative to 7zip and a replacement for the somewhat handicapped Archive Utility on the platform. The unarchiver supports compressed formats to the older ZIP and LHA formats, to the latest 7zip formats.

 

8.) VLC
VLC player has been around for ages now, and it appears it’s still the best all-in-one media player for the Mac platform. It supports almost all the formats, can be used for transcoding and even for streaming media.

9.) SuperDuper!
System backups are simple on Windows PCs, but when it comes to taking backups of a fully working Mac OS X installation, SuperDuper! Can get the job done. It’s not free, but the $27.95 is totally worth the peace of mind.

 

10.) Things
Task management is an important task by itself. With apps being developed for everything from Windows to Linux to even mobile platforms, Things is one app that you cannot miss if you have 100 things to do.

Credit: http://digg.com/story/r/top_10_mac_software

BBM Social Platform – Now in Beta!

At BlackBerry® DEVCON 2010, Research In Motion® (RIM®) announced the BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™) Social Platform. Today, the BBM Social Platform officially moves into public beta. BlackBerry platform developers can now start adding social Super App features to their applications, leveraging all the power that the BBM Social Platform has to offer!
With this beta release, developers have the ability to accomplish the following:

• access and update fields in the user’s profile such as status, avatar and personal message;
• create their own custom areas within the user’s profile for promoting recent application activity or storing trophies and achievements;
• initiate and embed chats with friends;
• initiate application-to-application background communication through BBM for sending and receiving application instructions, such as moves in a game or any other application state changes;
• initiate file transfers;
• the ability to share applications virally with friends in their contact list.

Included in this beta of the BBM Social Platform are special simulators for BlackBerry smartphone OS 5.0 and 6.0 that allow for simulation of BBM communication between two instances of the simulator. This gives developers the ability to test the exact workflow and BBM integration that they can expect to see on a live device.
While this current beta is for Java® developers only, BlackBerry® WebWorks™ developers will soon be able to get in on the action as well – stay tuned to the Inside BlackBerry Developer Blog for more details. In the next beta drop – slated for April 2011 – the BBM Social Platform is intended to include full support for the BlackBerry WebWorks platform, ensuring that BlackBerry WebWorks apps have access to all the same APIs and features that Java developers do.
To get started with the BBM Social Platform beta and review all the features supported, be sure to check out the BlackBerry Developer Zone’s BBM Social Platform page – and stay tuned to the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog for more beta updates!

courtesy: http://devblog.blackberry.com.

Internet Explorer 9 launches tonight?

Microsoft Announces Global Availability of Internet Explorer 9
More than 250 top sites from around the globe join the launch of Internet Explorer 9 to celebrate a more beautiful, immersive Web.

AUSTIN, Tex. ― March 14, 2011 ― Microsoft Corp. today announced the launch of the latest version of the world's most-used browser with the release of Windows Internet Explorer 9 in 39 languages at an event at the SXSW Interactive conference. Internet Explorer 9 is Microsoft's most-downloaded browser beta of all time, with more than 40 million downloads, and it has already has gained more than 2 percent usage on Windows 7. Already more than 250 top sites from around the globe are taking advantage of the capabilities in Internet Explorer 9 to deliver differentiated experiences to their customers, with many featured on http://www.BeautyoftheWeb.com. Together, these partners reach more than 1 billion active Internet users on the Web.

"The best experience of the Web is on Windows with Internet Explorer 9," said Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president, Windows Internet Explorer, at Microsoft. "Today, the Web can unlock the power and performance of the best PC hardware through Windows and Internet Explorer 9. Websites also can act more like applications within Windows 7, with features such as Pinned Sites. In less than a year, Internet Explorer 9 went from early preview to final release with the help of hardware partners and the Web community."

Top Sites and Designers Take Advantage of Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer 9 is designed to bring sites front and center through Windows 7, enabling a more immersive, more beautiful Web experience. Features such as Pinned Sites and Jump List enable people to put their websites directly on the Windows 7 Taskbar, as though they were native applications, and then to quickly and easily perform tasks related to those websites, such as check their inboxes, change the music station, accept friend invitations or see breaking news.

In addition to 250 top sites, more than 1,000 other sites and designers are taking advantage of these new features with Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7. These sites include not only the largest sites on the Web, such as Facebook and Amazon, but also leading experiences from across the Web and the world.

- In social and information networking, Internet Explorer 9 partners include category leaders such as Facebook, Twitterand WordPress― the No. 1 global blogging platform ― in addition to leading professional networks in the U.S., Europe, Russia, Korea and Latin America.
- In e-commerce, partners include not only the leading worldwide shopping site, Amazon, and the No. 1 worldwide auction site, eBay, but also the leading site in the emergent "daily deals" space, Groupon.

- Video and streaming partners include three of the top five video-on-demand sites in the U.S. ― Hulu, Break.com and Dailymotion ― and leading Internet radio sites Slacker, Pandora internet radio and Jango. In addition, partners include top global broadcasters CBC and CTV in Canada, Wat.tv in France, and CNN in the U.S.

- News website partners in the U.S. include the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Huffington Post, as well as dozens of leading news sites globally across all major geographies.

"What people care about on the Web is their sites, not their browser. That's why Internet Explorer 9 is about making those sites shine. The browser is the theater, and the sites people visit are the play, and that is what Internet Explorer 9 makes better ― your favorite sites," said Ryan Gavin, senior director, Windows Internet Explorer, at Microsoft.

eBay is the world's largest online marketplace and a leader in mobile commerce. With pinning and Jump List features in Internet Explorer 9, everyone's favorite eBay experiences are just a click away. "eBay's integration with Internet Explorer 9 is like having a storefront on your desktop," said Robert Chatwani, senior director, eBay Internet marketing. "We're pleased that new functionality within Internet Explorer 9 allows us to innovate and bring new experiences to our customers, making shopping and selling on eBay more engaging than ever."

Pandora Internet radio is announcing a new dynamic Jump List for Internet Explorer 9. Tom Conrad, chief technical officer and executive vice president of product for Pandora, said, "This new feature allows our listeners to have immediate access to their personalized Pandora stations right from the taskbar with Internet Explorer 9, which will make for an easy-access listener experience."

Partners such as Gilt Groupe are already seeing early results indicating that Internet Explorer 9 customers who pin the Gilt homepage to their taskbar show a higher purchase rate than those on other browsers. "While results are early, customers using Internet Explorer 9 appear to purchase more per order when compared to earlier versions of Internet Explorer and other browsers. Given that our business model is providing dynamic new shopping experiences online every day, the value of Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7 is potentially very exciting to us and our customers," said Chris Maliwat, vice president of product management, Gilt Groupe.
Many partners are announcing special offers for Internet Explorer 9 customers that will be available in the coming weeks, including the following:
- Slacker. A free monthlong subscription for customers who pin the Slacker site to their taskbars
- Groupon. $5 in Groupon Bucks when making a first purchase from the Internet Explorer 9 Jump List
- Hulu. A free month of the Hulu Plus subscription for users who pin Hulu
- eBay. Offering coupons or eBay Bucks for bids or purchases made using the Internet Explorer 9 pinning and Jump List features
- Gilt. A series of product bundles for customers who make purchases of specified amounts via the Jump List

Fast Is Now Beautiful: Internet Explorer 9 With Hardware Acceleration
The new version of Internet Explorer takes advantage of the power of modern Windows PC hardware to improve all-around Web browsing performance. It is the only browser with hardware-accelerated HTML5 spanning all graphics, text, audio and video. Internet Explorer 9 harnesses the power of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), unlocking 90 percent of the PC's power that went previously untapped by Web browsers.

Developers can now build faster, more immersive websites that feel like native applications using HTML5, as well as runtimes such as Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight, both of which will take advantage of the hardware acceleration in Internet Explorer 9 in their next versions.

"Internet Explorer 9 has moved the bar in hardware acceleration, enabling Flash Player to tap into the GPU and creating a win-win situation for our mutual customers who want fast, rich content experiences," said Paul Betlem, senior director, Flash Player Engineering at Adobe.

"With Internet Explorer 9 and Flash Player taking advantage of the GPU, we continue the collaboration with Microsoft to further optimize performance. Both companies are also working closely to advance and streamline controls for managing Flash Player privacy and security settings in Internet Explorer 9."

"The next-generation Web is here today with Internet Explorer 9, accelerated by AMD's incredible computing platforms ― our award-winning AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units with DirectX11-capable graphics and AMD Radeon graphics cards," said John Taylor, director of Client Product and Software Marketing, AMD. "The next generation is defined by immersive gaming, rich video and fast, compelling, application-like experiences, validating the fact that GPU compute power and the ability to remove barriers between the CPU and GPU are highly relevant to the day-to-day computing performance that consumers expect and demand."

"Thanks to how Internet Explorer 9 taps into the power of the GPU, the Web is now more visual, more immersive and more powerful with NVIDIA GeForce. We are incredibly excited that consumers can now experience their favorite sites re-imagined and accelerated. It's a whole new Web," said Drew Henry, general manager, GeForce Business Unit, NVIDIA.

Improving Privacy and Security Online
Because the Web is increasingly less secure and private, Internet Explorer 9 is designed to be a trusted browser because it contains a robust set of built-in security, privacy and reliability technologies that keep customers safer online.

In December, Microsoft introduced Tracking Protection in Internet Explorer 9, which puts people in control of what data they are sharing as they move around the Web, by enabling consumers to indicate what websites they'd prefer not to exchange information with. Consumers do this by adding Tracking Protection Lists to Internet Explorer 9, and partners such as PrivacyChoice, TRUSTe, Abine and Adblock Plus have already published these lists.

Malware is now the No. 1 risk to people's security online, and Internet Explorer 9 provides the first Download Manager with integrated SmartScreen malware protection. The browser also introduces SmartScreen download reputation, a groundbreaking browser feature that uses reputation data to remove unnecessary warnings for well-known files and show more severe warnings when the download has a higher risk of being malicious. Studies show that Internet Explorer 9 blocks 99 percent of socially engineered malware attacks, five times more than Firefox and 33 times more than Google Chrome.

Raise Expectations for a Better Web
Partners from around the world are re-imagining their websites using the capabilities of Windows and Internet Explorer 9, creating new experiences that make the Web feel as native as PC applications. The result is a more beautiful Web experience.
"I love the Web for the kinds of joyous experiences it can create!" said Ze Frank, who is launching new features within the social gaming site, Star.Me, in coordination with the Austin event. "HTML5 is a huge step forward for the browser because it brings the Web back to a unified platform for creation. By integrating HTML5 into Internet Explorer 9 and hardware accelerating the browser, Microsoft has signaled its commitment to pushing the Web forward, and that is certainly worth celebrating."

"HP and Microsoft have a long history of bringing meaningful innovations to our customers. Today, we celebrate with Microsoft the launch of Internet Explorer 9, a new milestone in enabling faster and more visually compelling Web experiences," said Tony Prophet, senior vice president of operations, Personal Systems Group, HP. "Internet Explorer 9 is really an outstanding browser, and we're pleased to make it available on most of our consumer PCs."
"At Dell, we are focused on driving cutting-edge innovation in our consumer devices, and Internet Explorer 9 is the first browser to offer a richer, more immersive Web experience on our hardware," said Michael Tatelman, vice president and general manager of North American Consumer sales for Dell. "We know customers will see ― and experience ― the difference, and we're delighted to be working with Microsoft designers and developers around the world who are building this new, more beautiful Web."

More information is available at http://www.BeautyoftheWeb.com.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
For more information, press only:
Rapid Response Team, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, (503) 443-7070, rrt@waggeneredstrom.com

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft's Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.

My mistress Facebook!

Why orkut failed? Why inspite of having my profile on orkut, I have not visited my page since ages?

Only reason I can think of is Privacy. Orkut failed because users had privacy concerns! I moved to Facebook in 2008, when Facebook era had just begun and the only reason was PRIVACY (I say it loud). As a user I don’t want my pictures, thoughts, interest to be seen by everyone, so I switched to Facebook.

Well I am one of a character who sits in class, observe people, express myself by writing stuff, talk endlessly but when it comes to personal stuff, my extrovert attitude changes to a secretive attitude. I don’t want strangers to know me before they have met me.

And with all my love to Facebook, I hate you for selling my info; I hate you for making my hidden stuff public. I hate you!!! You took advantage of my emotions, my friends and their interest but I can’t live without you :’(

You dumped me like an ass, made me realize that there is no escape when you fall in love, be it with a guy or with a product. You can love it, hate it but can’t ignore it. My feelings were destroyed when I heard, ‘Mark Zukerberg interview, in which he mentions that the age of privacy is over’. Consequently I became a spoilt child. ;)

I will never forgive you for this, neither those of my friends will who lied in their office of been single and were caught red handed. :P

With this comments things you again dropped a bomb on me. I don’t want to show my intellectual side to my Facebook friends. :P… I don’t want them to know that I read Techcrunch and post my views on it.  I thought I will live life in a mysterious way but you faked me and my anonymity.

Facebook, you are like a mistress, who reveals everything yet hides the important part J