Skype have confirmed this issue on their blog and also stated that it have affected only few people. Skype had also issued a workaround to fix the issue but it was not working for many users. We ourself at Opentechnics had tried with the instruction provided by skype, but it never worked for us. The only workaround for us was to uninstall skype and reinstall it again which fixed the issue. This outage was not as serious as the one that happened in December last year, which had effect a large number of people.

As soon as people started facing this issue, there where lots of tweets regarding it on Twitter and most of them was blaming Microsoft for the outage. Recently Microsoft had accured Skype for $8.5 Billon which have caused tweets like this.

Twitter is a micro blogging site which was launched in 2006 and is one of the most successful social networking site right now. According to alexa statistics twitter is ranked 9th globally. TweetDeck is a desktop application developed in Adobe Air, which allows users to  post to twitter, facebook and other similar sites. TweetDesk, like twitter, is also one of the most successful project having a huge user base. TweetDesk is available for Windows, Linux, Mac, IPhone and Android devices.

The highlight of this release is the integration of Gnome 3. Gnome is one of the most popular desktop environment available on Linux. Gnome 3 is the next major release from Gnome Project and have brought out a complete revamped interface when compared to its version 2. Gnome 3 have been both criticised and appreciated by the Community for its new implementation of Desktop. Fedora is the first major distribution to integrate Gnome 3 as default. “GNOME 3 is being developed with extensive upstream participation from Red Hat developers and Fedora volunteers, and GNOME 3 is tightly integrated in Fedora 15″ claims Jared Smith.

Another highlight of this release is the introduction of Btrfs filesystem, which is developed by Oracle. Even though ext4 is the default filesystem in this release, but Btrfs is provided as a menu option which the user can select if required. Fedora is trying to make Btrfs as the default filesytem in its next release.

Like many other recently released distributions like Opensuse, Ubuntu, Fedora also moved to LibreOffice from OpenOffice. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and was created due to the licensing Issues brought out by Oracle soon after Sun Microsystem was accrued by them. Other features include introduction of a new security system, better power management, KDE plasma workspaces 4.6, Xfce 4.8 desktop environments, Spice integration etc. Overall this release looks to be really good, improving the overall usability to the next level.

The technology called PhotoDNA was developed together by Microsoft Research and Dartmouth College in 2009 for National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. This technology would take a blueprint of the photograph which is of inappropriate or offensive in nature and then do an image matching with billions of other images to locate photos with similarly inappropriate features. In a post by Bill Harmon in Microsoft blog, who is a lawyer at Microsoft’s digital crimes unit said that PhotoDNA detects child pornography with “zero false positives”.

This is not the first attempt by facebook to block any child pornographic materials into its network. Last year facebook together with MySpace, which is also another social networking site, joined then Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, now governor of New York, to develop a “digital fingerprints” database. When a user uploads any Images, the tool would analize that image and checks the database of pornographic images for any matches. If it finds one, then that image is not uploaded to their servers.

Microsoft have already implemented PhotoDNA technology in their Bing search engine and SkyDrive online storage service, and claims that they where able to detect more than thousands of such inappropriate and illegal images. With the PhotoDNA implementation, Facebook hopes that they would be able to bring an end to the child pornographic issue to an extend.

Late 2010 and early 2011 many private telecom companies have started to roll out their 3G services. The massive public campaign done by these companies seems to have bear fruit but we need to see whether this numbers will increase or decrease.

Even though the companies have all the technology to provide a good 3G connectivity, still its looks like users are having trouble with their connections. Many users have reported slow speed, call drop etc with the new 3G services that they have activated. So the the current figures looks like the consumers are interested to try out the new technology (in India), but whether the companies will be able to hold these customers forever needs to be seen in the coming months. Another complaint is the rates charged by the companies for 3G data connectivity. If the companies provide a better connectivity at a better rate, these usage figures show that there are users in India who are ready to consume these 3G services.

The release also includes the Netbook UX 1.2 (User eXperience), and In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) UX 1.2 with a speech recognition enabled, QML based application launcher and a sample IVI home-screen. Missing for this release is a Handset UX, development of which was led by Nokia, but there is a tablet developer preview.

The developers have also informed that they have started the development for version 1.3 which is scheduled for release on October, 2011. The features that might make into that version is already accepted and available here

After 65 days of development Linus Torvalds have released the version 2.6.39 of Linux kernel with major enhancement in firewall and hardware support. This release have introduced ipset, making it simple to configure and deploy firewalls. Another major improvement in this release is the support for AMD “Cayman” high-end graphics cards. There is also support for samsung netbook function keys and Realtek RTL8192CU and RTL8188CU Wi-Fi chips. There is also an enhanced Nouveau driver boosts support for Nvidia GPUs while a basic Poulsbo KMS driver is included, but without acceleration support.

By each release Linux kernel is improving hardware support to a great extend and this would help more mainstream usage of Linux on desktop.

According to the release notes, the new features carried on to this release is support for CSS animations and ability to switch to firefox development channel. Then there are few enhancements in this release for feature like Do-Not-Track. This release also supports improvements in canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance and standard supports in HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas. Linux users have something to cheer about, since this release provides better integration on Linux Desktops.

Mozilla has three main versions of Firefox now: the release version for mainstream users, the beta version with new features under testing, and the most raw, Aurora, a version to introduce those new features. Those three versions correspond to Chrome’s stable, beta, and dev releases. There’s also a nightly Firefox build for those who want to try whatever patches have arrived in the last 24 hours, but it’s most likely to be unstable.

“Mozilla recently introduced the Firefox Aurora development channel to support more frequent releases. The shift to a rapid release development cycle delivers cutting edge Firefox features, performance enhancements, security updates and stability improvements to users faster. After five weeks of testing on the Firefox Aurora channel, the next version of Firefox is ready for the beta channel” was the statement made by mozilla in their development blog regarding the new rapid release plan. Lets hope the new development plan would work out good for the future of Firefox.

Microsoft had laid out guidelines regarding hardware to be used for Windows Mobile during the launch in 2010. One of the guideline was to use at least 1 Ghz processor and most of the manufactures picked Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm in their smart phones. Use of ST-Ericsson processor in Nokia will mark a shift from Snapdragon processors even for other manufacturers.

Nova Thor U8500 will be the first processors that will go into some of the devices from Nokia. Nova Thor U8500 is based on ARM Dual Cortex A9 processor with ARM Mali 400 GPU for the 3D graphic support. It is reported that this processor would support multiple operating systems too. So in the near future we can expect smart phones that would be having either Nova Thor U8500 or Snapdragon dual core processor running on Windows Mobile 7 from Nokia.

Analyst Mike Abramsky of RBC Capital, said in his research note that by worst case scenario  production of the factory will be reduced by 1.8-2.8 million units. This is nearly 22-36% of the estimated 8 million IPad shipment for the third quarter. If the figures turns true then this could also effect the production for fourth quarter. Based on Abramsky’s best case scenario, the production might be hit by less than 1.3 units and will have least impact on fourth quarter.

The recent drop in Apples share of 1.5 %, according to Abramsky, could be because the investors have taken the worst case scenario into account. The news of explosion came out when Apple had recently had made their international launch of IPad 2 devices, which have raised the demand for the latest and popular tablet device.