Frequent frenemies and sparring partners Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly are set to have their longest debate ever, it was announced Monday.

Stewart’s and O’Reilly’s appearances on each other’s shows have long been eagerly anticipated occasions. Now, the two will face off in a 90-minute debate at George Washington University in Washington, DC on October 6. The debate, modeled after the presidential debates and dubbed “The Rumble In The Air-Conditioned Auditorium,” will be livestreamed for a fee, with half of the proceeds going to charity.

New York Post columnist Cindy Adams blurbed the event, and O’Reilly used his Monday show to raz Stewart a bit.

“In order to illuminate the vital issues associated with the upcoming presidential election, Stewart and I will debate man-to-man, eye-to-eye,” he said. “Well, not really. He’s a tiny guy.”

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By Robert McMillan

Many users of GoDaddy’s web hosting services found their websites down and their e-mail not going through on Monday afternoon, apparently following a failure of the company’s Domain Name Service servers.

GoDaddy announced the problems around 11 a.m. Pacific with a short Twitter message, saying: “We’re aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We’re working on it.”

At the same time, posters to the Outages mailing list were reporting that GoDaddy’s DNS servers — the computers that tell, among other things, internet browsers where to find web servers — had been knocked offline.
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By Daniel Ionescu, PCWorld

Google’s mobile version of its Chrome browser has now graduated out of beta and is now available for the iPhone and iPad from the App Store. I took it for a spin to see how it compares to Apple’s built-in Safari browser. In brief, the Chrome iOS mobile browser has some innovative features, but is hampered by the fact it can’t tap into Apple’s Nitro JavaScript engine to Safari.

Look and Feel

Chrome for iOS has a similar look and feel to the desktop version that you know and love, so it won’t look completely foreign.
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Is Windows 8 really the makings of a fiasco? True or not, get ready to hear this more and more as the Windows 8 general release approaches.

by Brooke Crothers
Windows 8 FUD is starting to hit the fan.

That would be fear, uncertainty, and doubt. As in, “I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space.”

That was said yesterday by Gabe Newell, a former Microsoft employee and managing director of Valve Software, which makes games such as Half-Life and created the Steam gaming platform for Windows and Apple’s OS X.

Newell’s company is now moving Steam to Linux. Thus the comment, “we’re trying to make sure that Linux thrives” from Newell (in the same story linked above) before his Windows 8 critique.
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By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google will try to win more converts to a computer operating system revolving around its popular Chrome Web browser with a new wave of lightweight laptops built by Samsung Electronics.

Tuesday’s release of the next-generation Chromebooks will give Google and Samsung another opportunity to persuade consumers and businesses to buy an unconventional computer instead of machines running on familiar software by industry pioneers Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc.

Unlike most computers, Google’s Chromebooks don’t have a hard drive. They function like terminals dependent on an Internet connection. The laptops come with 16 gigabytes of flash memory — the kind found in smartphones, tablet computers and some iPods. Two USB ports allow external hard drives and other devices to be plugged into the machines.
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By Noel Randewich

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – PC chipmaker AMD’s chief executive is betting that its larger rival Intel has overestimated consumers’ willingness to pay top dollar for a new category of premium laptops.

Riding the coat-tails of Intel’s most expensive marketing push in a decade, new processors from AMD have been chosen for a handful of upcoming laptops in a wave of sleek personal computers with features like “instant on” made popular by tablets.

Targeting mainstream shoppers, thin laptops with AMD’s chips, previously code named Trinity, are set to sell in the $600 range, similar to many of the bulkier laptops now on the market and significantly cheaper than the high-end, Intel-powered ones increasingly appearing in stores.
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Windows 8 should available by November when Intel-based devices hit retail stores.

by Brooke Crothers

The first wave of Intel-based Windows 8 tablets are expected to land in retail stores in November, a source familiar with device makers’ plans told CNET.

“The schedule is tight,” said the source. “Looking at what Windows is trying to achieve not only with a new OS, but a new OS that needs to run four to five architectures — three ARM, Intel, and AMD,” according to the source.
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