Sun announced this week the availability of VirtualBox 3, the latest version of its open source virtualization solution. The new version introduces experimental 3D graphics support and the ability to expose multiple CPUs to guest operating systems.

VirtualBox was originally developed by InnoTek, which was acquired by Sun last year. InnoTek launched an open source edition of VirtualBox in 2007, releasing most of the program’s code under the GPL. Alongside the open source version, the company has continued to sell a commercial version that has additional features, such as a built-in RDP server and full USB support. VirtualBox is cross-platform compatible and is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

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Gaming news this week began with a bang—our famed Mole revealed that price drops on both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles are coming this fall, along with some tasty new bundles.

A huge rush of news about StarCraft 2 has hit the gaming blogs this week. We break down the news reports and bring you the surprises, the oddities, and the pleasant surprises. The takeaway? The game looks great.

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It’s now a holiday weekend here in the US, but that doesn’t mean last week wasn’t exciting. Here’s a recap of the Week That Was.

The big news, of course, was the long-awaited release of Firefox 3.5. With support for HTML 5 tags like <video> and a high-performance JavaScript engine, 3.5 is lightning fast and ready for the future.

While Firefox was busy showing us the possibilities of the future, science was busy showing us just how petty we can be. Turns out that people will even reject free money if they think that they can screw over a rival by doing so.

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July is finally here, proving that the world of Apple can in fact keep turning while Steve Jobs is away. This week’s top Apple news examined the adoption rate of iPhone OS 3.0, a Newton bug, fraudulent iTunes gift cards, the disappearance of .Mac HomeSites, and more. Catch up here on the week that was with our news roundup—between throwing brats on the grill and checking out fireworks, of course.

What’s the uptake on iPhone OS 3.0? How quickly are users of Apple’s mobile devices jumping on the 3.0 bandwagon? Conflicting data points from multiple sources give us anything but a clear answer. If you want to participate in our own poll on the matter, though, let us know whether you have upgraded yet and why (or why not).

Impending Newton Y2K10 apocalypse narrowly averted: A dedicated Newton fan and hacker has developed a patch for Apple’s long-since-discontinued PDAs that will keep them humming along just fine after this New Year’s Eve. The patch isn’t for the faint of heart, but then again, neither is using a 20-year-old PDA.

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It’s now a holiday weekend here in the US, but that doesn’t mean last week wasn’t exciting. Here’s a recap of the Week That Was.

The big news, of course, was the long-awaited release of Firefox 3.5. With support for HTML 5 tags like <video> and a high-performance JavaScript engine, 3.5 is lightning fast and ready for the future.

While Firefox was busy showing us the possibilities of the future, science was busy showing us just how petty we can be. Turns out that people will even reject free money if they think that they can screw over a rival by doing so.

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SonyInsider dug up an FCC filing that indicates that the forthcoming PSP Go will have a significantly faster top processor speed than than current PSP models. Specifically, the Go’s CPU can clock up to 480MHz, compared to the 333MHz speed of the existing models.

The site ends the post by asking the obvious question: “What will a 480MHz PSP Go bring to the table?” I suspect the answer to this is, “Nothing that hasn’t already been announced.” Let me explain.

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In an age where your boss, coworkers, parents, and even (*gasp*) grandparents are finally joining social networks, we are all more aware than ever that we had better keep things relatively clean. And if you were someone who joined MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, or a number of other sites years ago, you may have more cleaning up to do than usual—after all, back then, you were probably young(er) and dumb(er), posting silly pics of your drunken escapades or questionable updates regarding your unusual interest in English cucumbers.

If you delete questionable images of yourself, you may be in the clear—or you may not, depending on the social network. As it turns out, some social networks delete your images right away while others hold onto them even after claiming they’ve been deleted. This was the discovery made by researchers at Cambridge University last month when they found that images deleted from social media sites are often left on the server, ripe for anyone to embed elsewhere or link up.

We put this finding to the test and found that some of the most popular sites on the Internet do, in fact, keep images on their servers after you delete them. On May 21, 2009, we deleted photos from four of the networks most used by the Ars staff and readership and monitored them for six weeks. The four networks we checked were Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

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There’s no denying that gaming publisher Midway has had a rough time in the past year. After an insane saga of strange twists, turns, accusations, and increasingly dire news, most of us weren’t entirely certain that the beleaguered publisher would actually survive to see 2010. Despite our doubts, it turns out that Midway is living to see another day, having just been acquired by Time Warner for $33 million.

For those of you new to the situation: after the company’s much-hyped Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe earned lukewarm reviews and reasonable (though not amazing) sales numbers, Sumner Redstone sold his controlling interest in Midway for $100,000, and the publisher wound up laying off roughly 25 percent of its workforce and killed many games that were currently in development. It was then revealed that, even though employees weren’t getting paid what was owed to them and the publisher was filing for bankruptcy, executives were still raking in a great deal of cash during all this.

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NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander, which spent the summer in Mars’ northern polar regions performing a variety of science experiments, caused quite a stir when rumors circulated that it had discovered signs of life on the Red Planet. NASA eventually held a press conference to dispel the rumors, promising that more details would eventually be revealed when scientists got around to publishing papers that would describe the experiments in detail. That day has finally arrived; today’s issue of Science contains four papers that describe various findings from the mission. There’s no sign of alien life, but the studies do reveal an active water cycle on Mars—including night-time snowfall.

The papers rely on evidence from a variety of the instruments on the lander, and the description of the data provides an impressive catalog of the various ways that Phoenix could prod and query the Martian pole. In the months before Martian winter shut the lander down, it managed to dig a dozen trenches, taking soil samples from each. These samples went into wet and dry chemistry labs, had their conductivity tested, and were even examined using an atomic force microscope. Meanwhile, cameras and a LIDAR system (a laser-based range detector) scanned the surroundings.

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It isn’t often that you find AT&T and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in agreement, but consensus has been reached on one matter: ASCAP’s demand that wireless companies pay it license fees for ringtones is, well, ridiculous.

On Wednesday EFF called the move “outlandish” and “a ploy to squeeze more money out of the mobile phone companies.” The advocacy group filed a friend of the court brief with the United States District Court for the Southern District New York this week, which is hearing the dispute between ASCAP, AT&T, and Verizon over whether the telcos have to pay the music licensing body royalties for wireless ringtones. Joining the amicus brief are Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology. Meanwhile CTIA - The Wireless Association, to which the big telcos belong, has also filed an amicus brief in the case.

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