“Welcome to the SD Card Menu! Here, you can launch channels saved on SD Cards by temporarily utilizing the Wii System Memory.” CONFIRMED. That’s right, launch from SD.

If your system memory is full, you still have to delete stuff, but there’s now a streamlined, automated process to do that from this new SD Card Menu. It will even choose stuff for you, if you want.

Update: The new Wii system update also adds support for SDHC cards up to 32 GB — that’s alotta Virtual Console games folks!

Read more here:  Wii System Menu 4.0 and here: Wii Shop Channel’s SD Card Menu

Now all we need is a DVD Channel and I’ll be set for life… well, that and perhaps a new WiiHD or some such.  Excellent news!  Tonight I shall be doing some needed spring cleaning of my System Memory.

Military members and retirees, paid typically on the 1st and 15th of each month, are dealing with increased pricing of products and no pay raises, increasing family sizes and unscrupulous business practices. In military towns such as Killeen, Texas where the Army base Fort Hood is located, simply driving down the main streets show the extent of how this town has turned against the military not because service members are rich, but simply because they have a steady income and tend to have the same cash flow issues month after month. Cash advance shops advertising specifically towards military unable to make it from one payday to the next, pawn shops stating they’ll offer the highest price possible for those in the service and “easy loans here” signs are easy to spot in this town. Offering quick cash with extraordinary high interest rates allow these military members and retirees to feed their families but stay in debt for possibly years to come.

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This launch comes after the failure of the Falcon 1 (Flight 3). During Flight 3, a problem occurred just after the first separation which prevented the second stage from occurring and from reaching orbit. According to their press release, “SpaceX was aware of and had allowed for a thrust transient, but did not expect it to last that long. As it turned out, a very small increase in the time between commanding main engine shutdown and stage separation would have been enough to save the mission. The fix was also very simple, requiring one line of code to be changed.”

You can see the video of the launch here:

Congrats, again, to SpaceX!

read more @ Neowin.net | digg story | Video replay @ SpaceX

So, I’m off to see Jerry Seinfeld tonight at the Orpheum theatre in Omaha… I’m totally excited!  I can now add Jerry Seinfeld to my list of “Comics I’ve Always Wanted to See Live.”  So far that list contains Lewis Black and George Carlin.  After Seinfeld I dunno who else is on the list… I’d have to think about it.

Speaking of Jerry, did you get a chance to view his Microsoft commercials?  If not, you’d best get to watching because as of today, they’ve halted the campaign:

Microsoft is expected to announce Thursday that it will be suspending its ad campaign featuring Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and veteran comedy superstar Jerry Seinfeld.

Valleywag broke the news Wednesday, and Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw told the LA Times that the move was planned, despite the appearance that the company is reacting to negative reaction to the ads.

According to Mr. Shaw, the Seinfeld portion of the campaign, for which he was reportedly paid some US$10 million, was always intended to be just an introduction for the overall campaign — a two commercial introduction for $10 million.

“All along we said we were having a teaser campaign,” he told the LA Times. “We’re getting ready to start the second phase. This was the plan all along.”

Here is the first commercial:

And the second:

Sad that there won’t be more, but at least we got to enjoy it while it lasted.

Well, I have to go… I need to ponder peanuts on airplanes and why they have that little slot for razors (who is shaving on a plane?!).

Hopefully the tests give them the information they’re looking for and perhaps we’ll finally find out where mass comes from (read about the Higgs Boson).

At Google, we spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And like all of you, in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends – all using a browser. People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they’re doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago.

Since we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

So today we’re releasing the beta version of a new open source browser: Google Chrome.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff – the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better . By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

This is just the beginning – Google Chrome is far from done. We’ve released this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and we’ll continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others – and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

But enough from us. The best test of Google Chrome is to try it yourself.

Links:

Download it
More Info
Chrome “Comic Book”

My immediate impression of the browser:

1. Fast as sin.
2. Ugly as sin.

We’ll see how things progress as I test it out (screenshot below).

We’re excited to release IE8 Beta 2 today for public download. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please try it out!

You’ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.

While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2. Before the team blogs about our Beta 2 in detail, here’s an overview of what you’ll find in IE8.

We focused our work around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).

Go ahead and download it here!

For years now I’ve been using the same keyboard at home, a Microsoft Wireless Desktop Elite Keyboard. It’s not a bad board, thought it has seen better days. While looking around for a replacement I came across what appears to be the Keyboard of the Future! Not only is it small, compact and connects via Bluetooth, but it has no physical keys! This “keyboard” is actually a laser projection that will display a “virtual” keyboard on any flat surface.

The “geek” part of me instantly decided this would be the best keyboard ever, but the logical part of me had some hesitations. How well would it work? Would it be able to handle a very fast typing speed with accuracy? Would it be comfortable to use? Well, thanks to our good friends at ThinkGeek, I was able to get a hold of one of these devices to try out and give you all a taste of what it’s like to live in the future of computing.

Click here to read the whole thing, and stay tuned for my next review!!  Oh, and here’s a nice pic of it in action:

Coool!

Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. have discovered a technique that can be used to bypass all memory protection safeguards that Microsoft built into Windows Vista. These new methods have been used to get around Vista’s Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and other protections by loading malicious content through an active web browser. The researchers were able to load whatever content they wanted into any location they wished on a user’s machine using a variety of scripting languages, such as Java, ActiveX and even .NET objects. This feat was achieved by taking advantage of the way that Internet Explorer (and other browsers) handle active scripting in the Operating System.

While this may seem like any standard security hole, other researchers say that the work is a major breakthrough and there is very little that Microsoft can do to fix the problems. These attacks work differently than other security exploits, as they aren’t based on any new Windows vulnerabilities, but instead take advantage of the way Microsoft chose to guard Vista’s fundamental architecture. According to Dino Dai Zovi, a popular security researcher, “the genius of this is that it’s completely reusable. They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That’s completely game over.”

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