The site is closing it's virtual doors in protest against the proposed SOPA act (Stop Online Piracy Act) which is currently being debated by the US House of Representatives, while the Protect IP Act is the version before the Senate.

Under the legislation, a single website would be held responsible for all of the content on it no matter how it had got there and whether users had put it up.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced the planned global block-out of the site's English pages on Twitter this morning, after first raising the idea on Monday.

Mr Wales said the block-out would run from midnight US Eastern Daylight Time on Wednesday to midnight the next day (4pm – 4pm AEST).



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Intel's market-moving statement today (December 12, 2011) that it expects a fourth-quarter revenue shortfall of roughly $1 billion has crystallized the impact of the hard disk drive shortage. So how bad is it? ....

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-57...col;topStories

Today Intel announced the new LGA 2011 platform that includes six-core Core i7 processors from Sandy Bridge-E family and a new X79 Express chipset. This platform will most likely become highly desirable for all computer maniacs, because it not only allows you to use the today’s most powerful processors, but also supports PCI Express 3.0 graphics bus and high-speed quad-channel memory. In other words, this is the best thing that is available for a desktop system today. Nevertheless, let’s try to find out how much more superior the new Core i7 model is to everything we have worked with before....

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...60x-3930k.html

Also:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5091/i...high-end-alive

While "market gurus" and financial pen pushers tend to dwell on Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) recent misses, they tend to miss that in the operating systems business, the company is relishing the greatest sales success in its history. Selling faster than any other version of Windows -- or any other operating system in the history of the world, for that matter -- Windows 7 soared to a 40.21 percent (appr.) installation rate in under 2 years, bumping the much beloved Windows XP to second place (38.64 percent).

http://www.dailytech.com/Windows+7+P...ticle23016.htm

Rob Pike announced that longtime colleague Dennis Ritchie, father of the "C" programming language, has died at age 70.

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Apple has announced the death of Steve Jobs

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http://m.theage.com.au/technology/te...006-1lag8.html

Apple plans to unveil its next generation iPhone next month, technology blog AllThingsD said Wednesday (September 21, 1911).

AllThingsD cautioned that Apple could "change its plans anytime," but said the present plan calls for Apple's new chief executive Tim Cook to preside over the launch of the iPhone 5 on October 4.... Apple released the iPhone 4 in June 2010 and sold 20.34 million of the devices last quarter.

http://news.yahoo.com/apple-unveil-i...143421897.html

... According to a document with Intel's performance estimates of the Core i7-3960X processor (six cores, 3.30GHz, 15MB cache) seen by X-bit labs, the forthcoming chip for the LGA2011 platform is clearly faster than its predecessor Core i7-990X (six cores, 3.46GHz, 12MB cache) across a range of benchmarks despite of lower clock-speed amid the same amount of cores due to advantages of the Sandy Bridge micro-architecture over Nehalem/Westmere micro-architecture, quad-channel memory controller and other innovations.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis...Estimates.html

Tech industry legend and one of the finest creative minds of a generation has resigned as CEO from Apple.
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A small number of users are unable to install Microsoft Office due to a persistent .NET Framework 4 corruption issue in Windows 7. It is unclear exactly how many users are affected.... Microsoft has known about this problem for over a year and has thus far been unable to fix it.... The only solution at this point is a clean install of Windows. In some cases repair installations and other tricks will not solve the underlying problem.... The problem makes users unable to install Internet Explorer 9 and Microsoft Office.... The problem affects users with a variety of hardware configurations (HP, Dell, Apple, etc.) and a variety of operating system versions (from Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit to my own Windows 7 Professional 64-bit).

http://www.dailytech.com/NET+Framewo...ticle22503.htm