Amazon’s second generation e-reader has arrived after a lot of fuss, speculation, leaks, and what’s worse zero inventory. The Kindle 2 (sold at $359) is slimmer and sleeker than its predecessor and has implemented a mini five-way joystick for navigation, making a snap.

The upgraded screen now displays 16 shades of grey and supposedly renders pages 20% quicker – which hopefully improves upon the somewhat distracting redraw/blinking e-ink situation seen on Kindle v1. (Ars digs the new display, CrunchGear does not. For what it’s worth, I tend to agree with Ars.)

Most of the negative comments I’ve got centers on Kindle pricing – which many feel may be too expensive. However, keep in mind the initial hardware cost includes access to reasonably priced New York Times best sellers ($10/pop among them) and a lifetime of Sprint wireless data services (aka Amazon Whispernet). Having said that, TechRepublic figures you’d need to purchase over 50 books to come out ahead.

Still, these sorts of tech acquisition decisions aren’t really based largely on value, so this new gadget might help Amazon take off.

Sony has confirmed that it will stop making tube-based TVs by the end of the month. Sony had actually ceased production of CRTs in Japan back in 2004, according to MarketWatch, but it was still churning out “Trinitron”-branded tube sets in Singapore and Malaysia for sale in Latin America and Asia.

The news is sad but inevitable, with the rapid rise in flat-panel TV sales taking a serious toll on the CRT market. I was a CRT holdout myself until just a couple of years ago, when I finally replaced my 32-inch Sony WEGA HDTV (my second WEGA, actually) with a 42-inch Westinghouse LCD TV (since replaced by a 46-inch Sony Bravia XBR4-and yes, I love it).

And indeed, many videophiles will still tell you that the latest flat-panel sets still can’t hold a candle to CRTs in terms of video quality. My old Sony WEGA tube-based HDTV, for example, had the deepest, darkest black levels I’ve ever seen in a set, even compared to Pioneer’s Kuro plasma line.

Now resolution, that’s a different matter. But for what most people watch today, standard DVDs, the CRT is still tops. We get our DVDs from the local library; they get them as soon as they get released for cable distribution.

Having said this, we should not weep over the disappearing of Sony’s CRT TV Sets. We can still find a lot of great sets on E-Bay, ready to be snatched. Have you ever wondered why these products are cheap and how it reached E-Bay? You shall find the answer at www.i-soldit.com.

At iSold It anyone can stop by any iSold It store with an item they would like to sell, like the 9″ Sony Portable TV shown on the left, and many more Sony CRT-based TV sets. So, if you love top-quality movies, you should not waste time and get your hands on one of them. And, while you’re at it, you should check their really nice product selection.

An experienced staff will conduct some quick online research to help estimate its value. During the check-in process, the store staff will work with the owner to capture any key copy points he would like to make in the eBay listing. Once the item is registered, the item is placed in the iSoldIt inventory, photographed and listed in eBay.

Here’s a wacky piece of news which I’m sure most geeks would love…. I most certainly do!!!

Bill Gates, among other ICT luminaries, will be making an appearance at the next World Congress of Information Technology (WCIT) running in Kuala Lumpur from the 18th to the 22nd of May. The kicker is that Gates won’t be there in person…he’ll be there in holographic form.

Holograph presentations aren’t new – Al Gore had a holograph of himself at Live Earth Tokyo. With videoconferencing now more a norm than a rarity, not to mention the rising costs of fuel, and subsequently, air travel, speakers are now beating jet lag and long-haul flights with the help of video relays.

Gates will be speaking at the marquee session with Dr Ya-Qin Zhang, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Corp on the first day of the event, being held at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre.

Though Gates won’t be making a personal appearance, other tech luminaries will be. Intel’s Craig Barrett will be one of the keynote speakers along with H. E. Sha Zukang, Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs
United Nations, and Dr Hamadoun I. Toure, Secretary General, International Telecommunication Union.

On the business side of things, Dell’s Steve Felice, President, Asia Pacific/Japan, Dell Global B.V. will be talking about IT as a tool for simplifying business. As always, green tech will also be a hot topic with a keynote speech by Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, Chairman, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Father of the Internet, Dr Vinton Cerf, Vice-president & Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, will also be there to talk about ‘Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century’.

The WCIT organizers expect a large turnout – with 2,700 delegates expected to attend, supposedly the largest gathering in the congress’ 30-year history. The last WCIT in Austin, Texas saw a turnout of 1.900 delegates. Besides the congress, 13 satellite events will take place including the International Advisory Panel meeting and the United Nations Global Alliance For ICT and Development conference.

Source: Tech.Blorge

A few days ago, we received a very pleasant surprise from PHP-Classes.org and we’d like to share it with you all.

Two of our published PHP classes were nominated for the PHP Programming Innovation Award.

The award aims to honor developers who share components in the form of PHP classes of objects that provide innovative features or solve problems with approaches that provide additional value to the PHP applications of other developers.

The two classes are the “Feed Finder Class” and “OPML Parser Class“. If you have found either of these classes useful, we’d like to hear from you. Also, if you feel like it, you can vote for us at PHP-Classes (you’ll need an site account for that). We’d really appreciate it!

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.4. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.X branch with over 120 various bug fixes in addition to resolving several low priority security bugs. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Further details about the PHP 5.2.4 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.4, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.4:

• Fixed a floating point exception inside wordwrap() (Reported by Mattias Bengtsson)
• Fixed several integer overflows inside the GD extension (Reported by Mattias Bengtsson)
• Fixed size calculation in chunk_split() (Reported by Gerhard Wagner)
• Fixed integer overflow in str[c]spn(). (Reported by Stanislav Malyshev)
• Fixed money_format() not to accept multiple %i or %n tokens. (Reported by Stanislav Malyshev)
• Fixed zend_alter_ini_entry() memory_limit interruption vulnerability. (Reported by Stefan Esser)
• Fixed INFILE LOCAL option handling with MySQL extensions not to be allowed when open_basedir or safe_mode is active. (Reported by Stanislav Malyshev)
• Fixed session.save_path and error_log values to be checked against open_basedir and safe_mode (CVE-2007-3378) (Reported by Maksymilian Arciemowicz)
• Fixed a possible invalid read in glob() win32 implementation (CVE-2007-3806) (Reported by shinnai)
• Fixed a possible buffer overflow in php_openssl_make_REQ (Reported by zatanzlatan at hotbrev dot com)
• Fixed an open_basedir bypass inside glob() function (Reported by dr at peytz dot dk)
• Fixed a possible open_basedir bypass inside session extension when the session file is a symlink (Reported by c dot i dot morris at durham dot ac dot uk)
• Improved fix for MOPB-03-2007.
• Corrected fix for CVE-2007-2872.

For users upgrading to PHP 5.2 from PHP 5.0 and PHP 5.1, an upgrade guide is available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.2.4.