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With all the big announcements coming out of Microsoft this week in conjunction with their BUILD developer conference, perhaps none is bigger than the accompanying changes to Internet Explorer 10.

Windows 8 users will have two different interface options for IE 10 - the standard desktop version and a new Metro style version. In addition to the use of Metro, this new variant of IE is also different in another significant way.

Rather than using plug-ins like the Flash Player to render content on web pages, it will rely on HTML5. This is similar to the approach taken by Apple for Mobile Safari on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky wrote on the Building Windows 8 blog:

Running Metro style IE plug-in free improves battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers. Plug-ins were important early on in the web’s history. But the web has come a long way since then with HTML5. Providing compatibility with legacy plug-in technologies would detract from, rather than improve, the consumer experience of browsing in the Metro style UI.

Samsung's former manager Suk-Hoo Hwang, fired in 2011 for his part in insider trading, has testified today against James Fleishman, the former vice president at expert-network firm Primary Global.

The manager revealed some details about how he leaked information about iPad shipments to the hedge fund manager months before Apple even announced it.

Hwang was given immunity from trial for his testimony.

In December 2009, Hwang met with the fund manager and explained that Samsung was supplying screens for an upcoming Apple tablet, and a lot of them too. The fund manager had been "very excited" by the news, adds Hwang.

During the convo, Hwang notes that he saw a man sitting near them staring and listening and figured it could have potentially been an Apple employee.

Within a month, Samsung lost a contract with Apple for a different product and in June of this year, the FBI approached Hwang looking for info into the insider trading. The former manager was then fired by Samsung.

Netflix is lowering projections for subscriber numbers in Q3 by 1 million.

The change is due to customer reaction to the price increase for combined disc rental and streaming plans, which was announced during their Q2 earnings call. The price of Netflix's lowest tier DVD plus streaming plan was doubled from $7.99 per month to $15.98.

Their original prediction of 12 million subscribers to the new combined disc and streaming plan hasn't changed. However, estimates for streaming only and disc only plans have been reduced by 200,000 and 800,000 respectively.

The revised projections were revealed in a letter to shareholders from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells.

AT&T's LTE network is finally live.

The major U.S. carrier has announced today that the LTE network will go live in five cities this weekend.

Starting September 18th, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio will get the fast mobile data service.

Unfortunately, even for those in the cities, there are very few AT&T devices with LTE support outside of their LTE modem and the HTC JetStream tablet.

Data plans start at $50 for 5GB of use with a modem, comparable to Verizon's rival plan.

Qualcomm has shown off their latest mobile processor roadmap, and it appears your phones are going to get a lot more powerful, and soon.

Snapdragon processors, seen in a majority of today's Android phones will soon see core speeds of 2.5GHz, 67 percent faster than the current leader in the market, the dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon seen in the upcoming Sensation XE.

The "S4" chip, slated for launch in devices in February, will not only have quad-core at 2.5Ghz, but Adreno Graphics, 3D, 1080p HD, and 3G/LTE multimode as standard.

CEO Paul Jacobs says it is not all about speed however (via Lint):

It’s not about how many cores or how many gigabytes, it’s how well you can optimise the system.

Check the rest of the lineup in the picture below:

AoL, Microsoft and Yahoo have teamed up this week to compete better against search giant Google.

The three companies will begin selling ad inventory on each other's service/sites in an effort to increase their share of ad spending.

Each also hopes to get larger Web properties to share their ad inventory, as well.

For now, the deal is for "Class 2" display inventory (aka graphic ads that need to be handed over to ad networks to sell) but could be extended.

WSC explains that if, for example, "Microsoft were to receive a big order for a certain kind of ad impression, it would fill that order with its own inventory as well as with what’s available form its partners, AOL and Yahoo." The new partners would then share the revenue and take a larger cut than if a third-party had done it.

Clarifying statement he made earlier in the week, Microsoft Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky, told analysts programs written for older Windows versions won't be compatible with Windows 8 on ARM processors.

During Tuesday's keynote address at Microsoft's BUILD conference, Sinofsky mentioned that the applications being demoed would run on either the x86 or ARM architecture.

ARM processors are typically used for devices like phones and tablets where low power usage is more important than speed. Windows has been primarily (except early versions of Windows NT) been written for x86 chips.

At Microsoft's annual Financial Analyst Meeting yesterday, Sinofsky was asked how legacy applications would be able to run on ARM processors, to which he responded:

I don't think I said quite that. I think I said that if it runs on a Windows 7 PC, it'll run on Windows 8. So, all the Windows 7 PCs are x86 or 64-bit. We've been very clear since the very first CES demos and forward that the ARM product won't run any x86 applications.

It's an important distinction which underscores a major difference between Microsoft's tablet strategy compared to Apple.

Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick reveals figures at this year's ThinkEquity Growth conference.

Zelnick says the blockbuster game has now shipped 22 million copies worldwide since its debut in early 2008.

While the figure is shipments and not sales it is hard to imagine there are too many unsold shipments for such an old game.

The chairman adds that they have now shipped 114 million units of the franchise. It is unclear whether those figures include GTA and GTA 2, which were released for the PlayStation 1.

Other hit games from RockStar (Take-Two) include Red Dead Redemption at 12.5 million shipped, the Max Payne series at 7.5 million and L.A. Noire at around 4 million.

Rumors have been flying around that Take-Two will launch GTA V next year.

AMD set a new world record for CPU speed, overclocking one of their upcoming 8 core FX chips to a speed of 8.429GHz.

The blazing fast speed was achieved by cooling the CPU to -180 degrees centigrade using liquid nitrogen cooling.

The achievement, which tops the prior record of 8.308GHz, was officially recognized by earlier this week by Guinness World Records. They presented an award to the company at an AMD technology showcase in San Francisco, Calif.

Although that's not particularly useful for the typical consumer, AMD also managed a significant speed boost using air and water cooling.

AMD's Simon Solotko wrote:

Even with more conservative methods, the AMD FX processors, with multiplier unlocked throughout the range, appear to scale with cold. We also achieved clock frequencies well above 5GHz using only air or sub-$100 water cooling solutions.

The AMD FX CPU is expected to be available later this year.

Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata makes it clear the company will not get into the mobile games business.

Reiterating statements he has made in the past, Iwata, speaking at the Tokyo Game Show press conference, has said unequivocally that Nintendo will not begin making games for Android, iOS or other mobile platforms that aren't their own.

Says the CEO (via Rant):

If we did this, Nintendo would cease to be Nintendo. Having a hardware development team in-house is a major strength. It’s the duty of management to make use of those strengths. It’s probably the correct decision in the sense that the moment we started to release games on smartphones we’d make profits. However, I believe my responsibility is not to short term profits, but to Nintendo’s mid and long term competitive strength.

Steve Ballmer continues to insist Windows Phone can be the number three platform in the smartphone market.

In a presentation at Microsoft's annual Financial Analyst Meeting, Ballmer said, "I think we're in absolute good shape in order to be a very strong third ecosystem in the smartphone world."

He appears to be pinning his hopes on Microsoft's primary partner in the platform, Nokia, who hasn't released a single Windows Phone handset yet, and will likely be concentrating on European markets initially.

He said of the partnership:

With Nokia we have a dedicated hardware partner who is all in on Windows Phone. They're working with us in exactly the way we described, to try to get into new markets, find new price points, take a look at new hardware design. They're all in on Windows. They're not doing something with Android, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Boom, our innovation interests are completely aligned.

But is that really true?

Nokia certainly wants to climb back to the top of the worldwide smartphone market, a position they lost to the dominance of the iPhone and Google's Android. Even if successful, that would have limited implications outside Europe.

New Terms Of Service for Sony's PlayStation Network make it nearly impossible for their customers to sue over any future data breaches.

The TOS changes were rolled out as part of a consolidation of Sony online services into Sony Online Services. The new terms affect both PSN and Sony Entertainment Network customers.

The TOS sets out a dispute resolution process designed to make it as difficult as possible for Sony to be sued by users of their online services:

If you have a Dispute with any Sony Entity or any of a Sony Entity's officers, directors, employees and agents that cannot be resolved through negotiation within the time frame described in the ?Notice of Dispute? clause below. Other than those matters listed in the Exclusions from Arbitration clause, you and the Sony Entity that you have a Dispute with agree to seek resolution of the Dispute only through arbitration of that Dispute in accordance with the terms of this Section 15, and not litigate any Dispute in court. Arbitration means that the Dispute will be resolved by a neutral arbitrator instead of in a court by a judge or jury.

A "Dispute," as defined in the new TOS covers all disagreements, "whether based in contract, statute, regulation, ordinance, tort (including, but not limited to, fraud, misrepresentation, fraudulent inducement, or negligence), or any other legal or equitable theory."

MOG will be launching their own free streaming music service tomorrow, rivaling Spotify in the U.S.

Supported fully by ads, the service will be very similar to its rival, offering millions of on-demand tracks for free.

Differentiating itself, MOG will give users a "gas tank" with a certain number of free tracks they're allowed to play.

Once you empty your "tank" you will have to share playlists with friends on Twitter and Facebook and other social networks in order to get more free tracks. As long as you share MOG virally, you should have an infinite amount of free tracks.

Spotify, while completely free for now, will move to a 20 hours per month capped tier in the coming months. The 20 hours are replaced on the 1st of the month.

According to the FT, Facebook has pushed its IPO to the Q3 2012.

The IPO had been expected for April, with some analysts believing it could come as early as this November.

When the social networking giant goes public, it could have a market value upwards of $100 billion. Private valuations have placed the capitalization at as high as $80 billion, so far.

The source claims founder Mark Zuckerberg wants to keep Facebook's employees focused on the site and not on a potential payout, and therefore has pushed the IPO.

Zuckerberg himself will be filthy rich once the company IPOs, as he has a 24 percent stake.

Microsoft is providing ISO images of the Windows 8 Developer Preview software shown at the BUILD keynote yesterday, and with VMware you (should) be able to sample it as a virtual Guest OS.

First things first. VMware Workstation is not free (VMWare Player is no good for this, for now). However, you can get VMware Workstation on a 30-day trial. To do this, you need to get a product key from VMware. This is a little bit annoying, but worth it (and definitely better than paying $199.99 for a license just to check out software).

You will need Workstation 8, which was just officially released yesterday.

Step 1 - Get VMware Workstation

To get VMware Workstation, you must first request a Product Key from VMware.

Follow this link to get the key for the trial: https://www.vmware.com/...

Creating a new VMware account is a little bit annoying, as they ask quite a lot of personal questions, but what you "really" need here is a valid e-mail address - your honesty for the rest of it is not really our concern. After registering, you will get an e-mail to the account you specified with information on retrieving a key. You will need this key during the installation of VMware Workstation 8. You can also download the VMware Workstation 8 installer from the VMware site.