There’s been some loose talk of Microsoft looking to release Service Pack 2 for Vista just as soon as they can. They’ve been reportedly rushing it so that there will be more incentive for people to buy Vista, instead of just waiting for Windows 7.

According to some inside sources, a release candidate for SP2 will be available in February 2009, with the final version scheduled for release to manufacturing in April 2009. When a version is labeled as RTM it’s not always available for download, but it has been put out in disc form, including OEMs.

Following suit with pervious service packs, it’s expected that Microsoft will release Vista’s SP2 in language waves. The previous service packs give us reason to believe that the English, German, Japanese, French and Spanish versions will be the first available, with Chinese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese available not long after.

If you’re a Gmail user and you’ve got a domain that’s registered through GoDaddy, you’ve been put in danger – from yourself.

A new security flaw in Gmail has caused a new exploit to run wild. The exploit essentially makes you to create a filter all on your own, allowing unwanted eyes to get access of your Gmail account.

In a nutshell, the exploit steals a cookie from you. Once this cookie has been swiped some malicious code creates a hidden iframe with a url that contains the variables required for Gmail to create a filter for your account. Once this is done, the hacker has free reign over your personal emails and whatever else you might associate with your Gmail account.

While this is clearly the shorthand version, be sure to check out the full rundown. If you’re one of the many that uses both Gmail and GoDaddy, we’d suggest that you take some time to check it out.

A few weeks back Twitter and Facebook ended some big talks, where Facebook was looking to snatch up twitter for $500 million of its stock.

Sometime in mid-October Facebook had instigated talks with the San Francisco- based Twitter about possibly bringing them both together. And while the idea seemed great on paper (the world’s fastest growing microblogging site along with the obscenely popular social networking site), concerns of integration and cost were a large part of why the deal didn’t come to fruition.

Still, Twitter executives and board members felt that they should work on building their own revenues before they look at the possibility of a merger. Currently, they’ve got none.

What the future holds for Twitter, we don’t know. But in the meantime, we’ll continue to keep all of you updated on how we feel by using it.

That’s right Valve faithful, just this week Gordon Freeman celebrated his valiant service at the Black Mesa Research Facility for the 10th time. That’s a whole decade of butt that Mr. Freeman has been kicking, and he’s opened up the door for tons of other great games.

It was the release of Half-Life that really put Valve on the map, and the video gamer’s world is a better place because of it. Games like Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fotress (2!), Natural Selection and Left 4 Dead have all come out thanks to Half-Life's humble beginnings. If it weren’t for the release of Half-Life 2 and the extremely flexible and stable Source engine, much of the landscape that we all love to shoot up from the first person wouldn’t be here today.

So give your best wishes to all the fine folks at Valve that have kept a strong decade of gaming alive. Without them, without Steam, without Gordon, we wouldn’t be spending so many countless hours (well, counted on our Steam profile pages) blowing out zombie brains and cursing those clever Spies.

“Personal” and “supercomputer” aren’t words that would usually appear side by side, unless you’re a mastermind at Nvidia. With the announcement of their latest machine, the Tesla Personal Supercomputer, they’re looking to bring what was normally thought of as gigantic, to the small time.

The Tesla only costs 1/100th of what a normal supercomputer cluster would cost, and only takes up a small fraction of the space. Thanks to heterogeneous computing, the process of CPUs acting in tandem with GPUs, it all fits right into a desktop form factor.

It’s reported that the Tesla is based off of Nvidia’s CUDA architecture, making it possible for the system to be programmed in the C language. 960 cores can be working side by side inside the system, and it’s claimed that these systems are already in use at MIT, Cambridge and other environments.

How much will your own personal supercomputer run you? An admittedly reasonable 10 large. Hey, 960 cores is a bargain at that rate.

Just this week Asus announced their brand new Eee Top desktop computer, which is meant to directly complete with Apple’s juggernaut, the iMac.

The Eee Top is a fancy take on desktop computing, that features a 15.6-inch touch screen, 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1GB DDR RAM, a 160GB 5,400RPM hard drive (boo!), a 1.3-megapixel webcam, and built-in WiFi. The price point is set at about $580 USD, but sadly the machine is only available in Taiwan. The rest of us will have to wait!

Though, the wait will be worthwhile, because if 15.6 inches sounds like it’ll be to small for you, Asus has a 20 and 22-inch version slated for release in June.

Don’t worry, fear mongers. The LHC isn’t going to start up anytime soon, and it’s all because of one bad solder.

When the LHC was initially started up, it was doing lots. It was going through all of its testing, it was gathering plenty of data to boot, and it wasn’t destroying the planet (I like that last one the most). The testing process of CERN’s love child was well underway, but sadly came to an immediate halt when a transformer broke in the last stage of testing, taking down plenty of expensive circuits with it. All, according to Spokesman James Gillies, thanks to one bad solder.

June is slated for the earliest restart date, but until then they’ve got a massive $21 million to spend on repairs. What exactly they plan to spend it on hasn’t been announced.

Apple has cut their Q4 iPhone production proposal drastically from what they had originally planned, according to a report by Freidman Billings Ramsey analyst Craig Berger. Having originally set out for a 10 percent drop, recent data suggests that production could drop more than 40 percent.

This data however, doesn’t necessarily reflect a significantly slowing iPhone demand. While the production is slowing down, iPhone shipments won’t be 40 percent lower.

Lowered production numbers could have a lot to do with the hurting economy, and the fact that Apple deliberately produced an excess of iPhones in Q3 to help provide some excess supply.

According to Berger, “…iPhone production plans are being revised lower suggests that the global [macroeconomic] weakness is impacting even high-end consumers, those that are more likely to buy Apple's expensive gadgets, and that no market segment will be spared in this global downturn. This is a negative signal for global demand, in our view.”

If you're a Compact Flash user, life's not been fair to you lately. You've seen CF stalwarts like Nikon and Canon turn their backs on this longtime favorite in favor of the new kid on the block, SDHC, in their newest DSLRs. Buy a new camera, and you make your collection of CF cards obsolete. Meanwhile, you've watched SDHC and its kid brother, SD, dominate the deals in your favorite big-box electronics superstores' weekly tabloids. And, just to add a cherry on the top of your cake of frustration, you've been thinking about how cool it would be to use wireless file transfer with Eye-Fi cards, but Eye-Fi is also in the tank for SD. Oh, and did I mention that "Compact" Flash is now the bulkiest flash memory format?

For all these reasons, Synchrotech's introduction of the CFMulti CompactFlash Type II to Eye-Fi + Multi-Card Adapter has come at a very good time. While CF adapters for SD cards have been around for awhile, the CFMulti also supports newer flavors such as SDHC and MMC+ as well as SD and any old MultiMediaCards (MMC) you have floating around. Plus, it's the first adapter to support Eye-Fi cards, albeit with a reduction in range. See the CFMulti and Eye-Fi FAQ for details and a list of tested cameras.

For more thoughts on the advantages of adding CFMulti to your gadget bag, and your chance to comment, join us after the jump.

When it comes to search engine popularity, Yahoo must have gotten used to playing second fiddle to Google. However, things just got a little worse for the big Y, as YouTube received more search traffic in August than Yahoo, clinching the #1 and #2 spots for Google.

YouTube received 2.6 billion search queries on August, barely slipping past Yahoo’s 2.4 billion. Of course, both numbers pale in comparison to Google’s 7.6 billion searches. For the first time, if both of Google’s holdings’ searches are combined, it puts Google at more than 10 billion searches in a single month.

Yahoo’s perpetual suitor Microsoft, meanwhile, served up a combined 1.0 billion searches across all its sites.

Of course, the Yahoo and YouTube’s respective search engines perform largely different functions, making a direct comparison of the two a little futile, but the statistic does nicely illustrate the dominant position Google is establishing for itself in all different sectors of the Web.