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Google rolls out new design

Google on Wednesday announced the release of their latest homepage and search design. The new “metamorphosis” reveals a cleaner page design with a left-aligned navigation pane and a brand new logo.

The new left-hand navigation pane is the largest change that most will immediately notice. The fully contextually sensitive side panel gives users the most relevant categories so that users can more easily refine their search query. The new navigation panel is a combination of three previous Google technologies: Universal Search, Search Options, and Google Squared.

Source: Neowin 

Apple sells two million iPads in less than 60 days

Apple's latest smash hit is the iPad, selling two million iPads in less than 60 days (59 to be exact). Apple originally sold 300kunits in the first day and one million iPads in 28 days, after releasing in the United States.

The iPad went on sale internationally last week in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, with nine more countries coming in July, and additional countries later this year. Apple announced their iPad back in January, and eventually the WiFi only model hit store shelves on April 3rd. The WiFi 3G model later followed on April 30th.

“Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, said after announcing they had sold two million iPads worldwide.

Although the device had some issues shortly after launch where consumers were having difficulties using the WiFi on some routers and USB charging issues, the iPad appeal has been strong with consumers, outselling Macs 2:1.

Source: Neowin

Seagate to announce 3TB drive later this year

Thinq has confirmed after speaking to Seagate's senior product manager Barbara Craig a 3TB hard drive will be announced later in the year. There are however a number of major issues beyond raising the areal density to allow users to get a 3TB drive running with full functionality.

One issue is many modern PCs are unable to run hard drives of this size because the original logical block addressing standard (LBA) cannot assign addresses to capacities larger than 2.1TB. The LBA standard was defined by Microsoft and IBM as part of the original DOS standard and it assigns an address to each 512-byte sector, the smallest physical block of data on a hard drive.

Seagate says Long LBA, which increases the number of bytes used to define an LBA address in the command descriptor block is the solution to getting around this problem. Craig believes the LBA issue was never seen as a problem until recent years. "Nobody expected back in 1980 when they set the standard that we'd ever address over 2.1TB."

Source: Neowin 

Ubuntu to drop Firefox for Chrome?

According to Ubergizmo, Canonical seems to be looking into the possibility of dropping Mozilla Firefox in their upcomingNetbook Edition of the world's most popular Linux distro, Ubuntu. In its place Canonical will use Google's Chrome, or possibly Chromium--the open-source, less stable project that Chrome is based on.

For as long as most can remember, Firefox has been the default browser of choice for Ubuntu, as well as many other popular Linux distros. The reason for this is likely due to Mozilla's open approach towards developer and their add-ons. Firefox prides itself on its magnificently large add-on repository--something which Chrome has just recently begun building.

No official decision has been made regarding the fate of Firefox in Ubuntu, but it's very possible that we will begin seeing test versions of Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 sporting Chrome in some form or another. Should Canonical make the switch to Chrome, it's unclear if it would also affect Ubuntu's desktop version. If Chrome becomes the default Ubuntu browser, many devoted followers would likely rise up in protest.

The first ever Ubuntu Netbook Edition is expected for debut alongside its desktop counterpart. The difference between this version and the desktop one is the new, single menu bar design, which gives the release more of a Mac look and feel. Since netbooks have less screen real estate, having a single menu bar allows users maximize their workspace. The bar will operate similarly to the one found in Mac OS X and will be only be enabled by default in Ubuntu's Netbook Edition. Ubuntu 10.10 will be called Maverick Meerkat and is scheduled for an October 28th release.

Source: Neowin