Mozilla has announced the availability of the first Firefox 3.1 beta release, an important development milestone for the popular open source web browser. Mozilla aims to make Firefox 3.1 a strong incremental improvement with user interface enhancements, new features, and increased support for emerging web standards. The new beta release includes a modest handful of noteworthy changes that improve the user experience.

Mozilla had originally planned to start code freeze for beta 1 in the middle of August, but decided to delay the beta release and do an additional alpha release instead.

The beta includes Mozilla’s new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which uses tracing optimization to deliver a massive performance boost that makes it faster than Google Chrome’s V8 engine. Although it still falls short of Apple’s recent Squirrelfish Extreme project, the Mozilla developers say that TraceMonkey still leaves plenty of room for additional optimization.

Although TraceMonkey is finally included in beta 1, the new engine isn’t actually enabled by default. It is still under heavy development and it reportedly exhibits some bugs that could impact JavaScript reliability. To configure TraceMonkey in beta 1, browse to “about:config” and then toggle the “javascript.options.jit.content” variable.

Another major feature that is included in this release is Mozilla’s new implementation of the W3C Geolocation Specification. It allows users to supply web applications with their geographical location. For privacy reasons, the browser will automatically prompt the user before passing that information to web sites.

Earlier this month, Mozilla Labs also released the Geolocation Specification implementation as a Firefox 3.0 extension called Geode so that users and developers can start testing the functionality and incorporating support for the APIs into their web applications without having to use Firefox 3.1 prerelease versions. Several web sites already have basic support for the feature, including Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and the Pownce microblogging service. We tested it with Outside.in Radar, a new web service that displays news headlines and other information about things that are near the user’s current location.

In addition to these new features, beta 1 also includes a lot of other improvements that we have looked at in previous alpha and nightly builds.

We are on the eve of Google announcing their search results for their 3Q. Google has become a major force in discovery and advertising by virtue of their ability to surface the closest result relevant to a user across the broadest set of queries on the Internet. Dozens of start-ups and certainly a few large players have tried to de-throne Google’s supremacy, but few have been successful. The switching costs are zero, yet Google’s market share has only gone up. Narrowing the domain has helped, and by limiting topical areas to things like shopping or health, companies have created market share distributions more favorable than in broad search; however, an end user is not going to use or remember 100 different search engines optimized for 100 different topics. In fact, as it has in Health or in Local, Google has picked off verticals one by one to super-optimize. This all got me thinking about how a start-up could ever beat Google at the broad game of search.

Search is decomposed into a few different elements. The first is a “spider” – a virtual bot that scours the web, parses web pages, and builds a representation of the web; the second is an algorithm that takes those spliced pieces and decides what pages are more important than others given a set of constraints or inputs; the third is a massive index that takes all this analysis and stores it so that at “query time”, an engine can quickly take the digested knowledge and weights, and return a result.

It’s my view that algorithms are not people or resource intensive. A few guys thinking very hard can come up with simple, revolutionary ideas as Sergey Brin and Larry Page did. Sure, Google has an incredible number of variables and residual terms that help refine its algorithm, but at the end of the day, it’s very rare that math is invented or discovered. In fact, I’d wager a “better algorithm” already exists somewhere in academic labs throughout the country. If it can be written or built by few, it is within the realm of startup possibility today.

I tend to believe the biggest challenge for a start-up remains circumventing the need to re-create Google’s infrastructure against an algorithm. Google spends over $2.8bln in CAPEX a year. They spend significantly more in CAPEX than they do on search algorithm specific R&D. I have heard estimates that maintenance and improvement of Google’s algorithms can be satisfied by a few hundred engineers.

Yes, I am a PC game freak. My friends already know this about me. I’ve gotten more people to try StarCraft, and Diablo than any other game I play. Since all the news about Diablo III being in the works, a lot of us have started playing Diablo II, Lord of Destruction (The expansion) again, as a kind of warm up for the new and improved Diablo III. There is also a new StarCraft due out, so I imagine we’ll all be playing that again soon too.

We spent most of our playtime tonight catching our characters up with each other. Hubby and I have Hell level characters with all the best of everything, so we helped J & C get their characters through normal level a little bit faster than normal. I enjoy playing online with friends over BattleNet because it adds so much to the game, don’tcha think? I love talking about these games, so feel free to comment. As a heads up, I don’t play WOW, and I don’t do ladder games. I have all of the Warcraft games, but don’t play them because I just prefer Diablo and StarCraft… and I like to pay bills, so really don’t need yet another game to distract me from working LOL.

Just in case you’re like me, and can’t stand losing the option of accessing your desktop while playing a full screen game, (I never know what time it is when I play that way), I found a video on YouTube that shows you how to open Diablo in windowed mode. I used to have it set this way before a reformat, but had since forgotten how I did it lol.

Basically, you just right click the shortcut for Diablo II LOD, choose properties, and in the “target” box, at the end of what’s already listed there, add a space, and then -w. In the video above, you’ll find this done at the 3.35 mark… the rest is for game geeks that run mods, so probably (maybe) doesn’t apply to you.

I’m so excited about the new games coming out, you have no idea! Below the cut I’ve included the trailers for the two games I’m anxiously awaiting release of… as well as a couple that show some of the changes made. Specifics on the system requirements haven’t been released yet, but you can bet I’ll be updating my puters accordingly! Yes, I’m THAT much of a game geek!

According to media reports, analysts said Monday that Apple will be released in September by the re-design of the iPod Touch and Macbook computer.

Analysts said Apple’s choice will be released in the United States before the holiday selling season, the new release will include the iPod Touch and Macbook notebook price cuts. Piper Jaffray & Co analyst Olson predicted that the new Macbook will be even more slim, the case may be engineering plastics, instead of the current aluminum, machinery keyboard may also adopt a new look.

iPod Touch will be similar to the appearance of Apple’s new 3 G iPhone cell phone, at the same time, iPod Touch the storage capacity will be further improved, the same storage capacity will reduce the price of the product.

In July at the company earnings meeting, the company has hinted that the company will launch enhanced version of new products. Apple claimed that the company is developing the “art” of new products, then customers would be “inconceivable” in the new product prices.

According to media reports, analysts said Monday that Apple will be released in September by the re-design of the iPod

Most people think of downloading music as an illegal act in every form. This assumption by the uneducated is very wrong in a lot of cases. One way for instance to get just about any song you want for free on your computer is YouTube. You can download all the YouTube videos your heart desires legally and for free directly from where you watch them.

No, there isn’t a “Free Download” button underneath the video player beside the “Embed” button, but that doesn’t make it illegal. Downloading and installing Real player will automatically give you the option on any flash movie to download it. Not all movies work, but all of YouTube’s videos do, and it’s a great way to keep an offline collection of all your favorite music for free.

Personally, I use this all the time, but I know people who use programs to record or extract the sound track from the videos. This is possible and actually not that hard if you know your way around recording software, but it is very illegal. I do not condone, nor do I download or record illegal copies of music.