Fans not lucky enough to get into a beta or player trial of SWTOR are hanging onto every little piece of news they can get to tell them something more about the game before release. Screen shot leaks from beta are one way that some of us are getting a sneak peek into the game and what it might hold. While it’s important to remember that anything released early, especially from a beta, is subject to change. In fact, it probably will change- several (more…)

cgriffin21 writes “Microsoft expected Internet Explorer 9 to be popular, but after more than two million people downloaded the IE9 beta in the first two days after its release, the software giant is having a hard time choosing which eye-popping statistics to cite. Microsoft says its “Beauty of the Web” site, which illustrates the aesthetic advantages of IE9′s support for HTML5 and hardware acceleration, has had more the 9 million visits and 26 million (more…)

Halo: Reach’s multiplayer beta, which ran from May 3 to May 19, had more than 2.7 million participants. In this exclusive interview, Bungie’s community director Brian Jarrard discusses the lessons, numbers, and stories that came out of the beta testing, as well as what we can expect to see in Halo: Reach when the full game releases Sept 14 on x360.

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dmbkiwi writes “The latest in the 4.x series of the KDE Software Compilation is due to be released in early August 2010. With the first beta of this release recently unleashed, I thought I’d download the openSuse packages and see what 4.5′s got in store for us.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After a Zerg rush of critics have been pressing forward to slam StarCraft 2, the beautiful beta gives players all the reason they need to fall in love with StarCraft all over again.

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Curlsman informs us that the first beta of Ruby on Rails 3.0 has been released ( release notes here). Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson blogged that RoR 3.0 “feels lighter, more agile, and easier to understand.” This release is the first the Merb team has participated in. Merb is a model-view-controller framework written in Ruby, and they joined the RoR development effort over a year ago. Reader Curlsman asks, “So, is version 3 of RoR going to (more…)

Microsoft announced the addition of Last.fm, Facebook and Twitter at E3 2009, much to the dismay of ornery antisocialites, promising a 2009 release for those services. With a beta reported to hit this month, it seems things are on schedule.

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