Bobert@flixnjoystix.com writes "On May 19th, fans of all ages will see the final installment of the Star Wars saga with Revenge of the Sith. However, for the first time ever a Star Wars film will be officially rated PG-13. Over the weekend the Daily Herald newspaper confirmed that George Lucas' conclusion to his nearly 30 year epic Space Opera received a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA is expected to release an official statement or press release sometime this week." This confirms the rumor we reported on back in March.

shashark writes "Technologically savvy users are merging these technologies to "Skypecast", using Skype's service to distribute recordings across the internet for free. This allows expert users to run their own mini-radio stations, which can be accessed by any Skype user. Skype does not actively support these uses, but encourages its users to find new applications for their service. Other possibilities discussed by Skypecasters at Unbound Spiral or Moodle are to turn an MP3 player into a radio station for any of Skype's 29 million registered users to dial up using their Skype line. Instructions also are available on how to record a personal soap opera and use Skype to distribute it en masse. Even more ominously, some Skypecasters record Skype calls and post them on the Internet."

jeffy124 writes "Opera Software has developed a new P2P communications technology, buzzword description being a platform independent real time short- to medium-range interpersonal communications technology. A press release is available on their website, as is a demonstration of the technology, which Opera has called "Soundwave"."

Odin's Raven writes "Opera Software's R-and-D department today announced the discovery of a new technology dubbed 'Opera SoundWave' - a platform-independent speech solution for short- and medium-range interpersonal communication. Based on open standards, Opera's patent-pending P2P speech technology uses analogue signals carried through open air, enabling users to communicate in real- time without the use of computers or mobile phones. Details (including link to tech preview) are available in their press release. I wonder how long it will be before a FOSS implementation of this technology emerges?"

mmarlett writes "Security Update 2005-003 updates Safari's support for International Domain Names (IDN) to prevent lookalike characters from being used to spoof the URL displayed in the address field, SSL certificate, or status bar. Opera fixed this in Feburuary while Mozilla just dropped support for IDNs, and you may recall that Internet Explorer did not suffer from this exploit because it sucks."

Masq666 writes "Opera Software stated on Friday that it had signed a deal with Nokia to put its mobile Internet browser on several Nokia phones. Opera has licensed its mobile Internet browser for a total of 11 Nokia phone models in recent years. Opera's CFO said he expected the rise in the number of phones with Opera's browser to outpace the increase in models."

Ritalin16 writes "Many web developers may be disappointed to hear that Microsoft decided to hold off on full CSS2 support with IE 7.0. As said by Microsoft-Watch: 'One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a flawed standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it.'" More commentary available from ZDNet. Generally related to the IE 7 Acid Test thrown down by Opera.

sebFlyte writes "The CTO of Opera has proposed a new version of the acid test for browser compatibility, and has challenged Microsoft to make IE7 a browser worth having that will do the Web good. He's asked to help from Web designers the world over to build a new page for Microsoft to test IE7 with to make sure it does everything Web designers want it to. "

Elitist_Phoenix writes "Scientists are developing a technology to save energy by transmitting sunlight into buildings through tubes. Indoor electric lighting is the largest consumer of electricity in commercial buildings. Their new system. called hybrid solar lighting, would reduce this energy usage with fixtures that supplement or completely replace electric light with sunlight, at times when its available. The system is called hybrid solar lighting (Google)."

An anonymous reader submits "David Naylor has reviewed the browser recognition capabilities of seven free website statistics services. Among other things, he kills the myth that many Opera users go unaccounted for in website statistics because of the default UA spoofing. Furthermore, he shows that the quality of browser recognition ranges from absolutely abysmal to near perfect."

Opera Watch writes "Opera has introduced a fix for the IDN spoofing security vulnerability in its latest beta version. The new version, Opera 8.0 beta 2, was released today on its FTP directory. No official announcement from Opera yet. Opera has created a white list for safe top-level domain names which include .no, .jp, .de, .se, .kr, .tw, .cn, .at, .dk, .ch, and .li. Sites not in the white list will show the encoded domain (with the IDN characters) in the URL field. The list is updated automatically when Opera checks for a new version."

Last Saturday night I had the pleasure of enjoying the "Dear Friends" concert of Final Fantasy music in Rosemont, Illinois. Composer Nobuo Uematsu is well known among game players for the intricate melodies that create the backdrop for most of the Final Fantasy titles. Even the older titles, 8-bit compositions though they were, made for evocative soundscapes. When taken into the hands of a skilled orchestra Uematsu's works are incredibly stirring pieces of music. Read on for my impressions from the start of the first U.S. concert series composed entirely of video game music. Update: 02/25 21:08 GMT by Z : Coincidentally, GamesIndustry.biz has an interview with Nobuo Uematsu available for perusal today.

An anonymous reader writes "A breakaway faction of the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) called WHAT-WG, or the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group--which includes Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera--is threatening to revolt over electronic forms standards. WHAT-WG has announced its intention to submit the draft to the W3C, posing the potentially awkward possibility of the consortium advocating two conflicting avenues for Web forms. The fate of a standard could also determine whether the order form could be accessed in any standards-compliant Web browser, or if it would be available only to users of a particular operating system--an outcome that has browser makers and others worried about the role of Microsoft."

Noksagt writes "Opera CTO Hakon Lie has countered the claims that Bill Gates made regarding Microsoft's superior interoperability last week. He points out their invalid webpages, MS's unwillingness to serve the same content to different browsers, IE's poor CSS support, tardy documentation and limitations of their XML format, and more." From the article: "You say you believe in interoperability. Why then, did you terminate the Web Core Fonts initiative you started in 1996? You deserve credit for starting it, but why close down a project which could have given you yet much good will? (Verdana sucks, but Georgia is beautiful!)"

kfrench writes "Internet browser speed tests for 'cold starts', 'warm starts', rendering CSS, rendering tables, script execution, displaying multiple images and 'history'. 'Opera seems to be the fastest browser for Windows. Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice.'"

Alex Reynolds writes "The beta version of Google Maps is now online, offering an alternative to Mapquest with what some might describe as a very much improved user interface, offering a cleaner layout, drop shadows, clickable waypoints and keyboard controls that allow you to move and zoom the map. For IE and Firefox/Mozilla at this point (no Safari or Opera support, as yet)."

Michael Clark writes "Seen those funky remote scripting techniques employed by Orkut, Gmail and Google Suggests that avoid that oh so 80's page reloading (think IBM 3270 only slower). A fledgling standard is developing to allow this new breed of fast and highly dynamic web applications to flourish. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format with language bindings for C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, TCL and others. It is derived from JavaScript and it has similar expresive capabilities to XML. Perfect for the web as doesn't suffer from XML's bloat and is custom made for our defacto browser language. JSON-RPC is a simple remote procedure call protocol similar to XML-RPC although it uses the lightweight JSON format instead of XML (so it is much faster). The XMLHttpRequest object (or MSXML ActiveX in the case of Internet Explorer) is used in the browser to call remote methods on the server without the need for reloading the page. JSON-RPC-Java is a Java implementation of the JSON-RPC protocol. JSON-RPC-Java combines these all together to create an amazingly and simple way of developing these highly interactive type of enterprise java applications with JavaScript DHTML web front-ends. " Click below to read more about it.

An anonymous contributor writes "XML.com just published an article titled Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL written by Michael Day and Håkon Wium Lie. The article was written in response to Norm Walsh's claim that CSS will never fix [printing]. Did you hear me? CSS will never fix it!. The article shows how a 100-line CSS style sheet gives you the same formatted version of W3C's Webarch as the 1000-line XSL style sheet by using Prince."

Kjella writes "A Califorian bill introduced last week would, if passed, expose file-swapping software developers to fines of up to $2,500 per charge, or a year in jail, if they don't take 'reasonable care' to prevent their software from being used to commit crime. C|Net has the story, as well as a link to the actual bill. By the overly broad definition of P2P software, almost any piece of internet software could be liable. This browser is certainly able to download and upload files ('Save as ...' and upload forms). Are Microsoft, Opera and Mozilla.org taking 'reasonable care' to prevent me from exchanging anything illegal? Of course, I never go there, but a friend of my uncle's third cousin's brother told me warez download sites work just fine ..."

Opera Watch writes "Opera Software today announced that it would offer free licenses to higher education institutions. This is a change from the previous cost of $1000 (US) for unlimited licenses. It remains to be seen, however, whether Opera will allow schools to give standard Opera licenses to students to use on personal computers/laptops within campus at no additional cost, that came with the $1000 license fee. This comes after a respected university advised its students not to use Internet Explorer, for its lack of security. Opera Software said they are doing so in an effort to meet the student and university need for security on the Internet."