Virgin Media, the UK’s leading internet service provider, today announced it would begin the roll-out of a 100Mb broadband service, the fastest available commercial product in the UK, by the end of 2010.

Virgin Media customers will be the first to get broadband speeds more than 24 times the average speed provided by other ISPs. The new speed tier is designed for tech-savvy users who want the very best the internet has to offer, and will act as Virgin Media’s flagship product in a strong portfolio of broadband speeds.

Virgin Media already leads the market for next generation broadband services in the UK and will have increased its top broadband tier from 20Mb to 100Mb in less than two years. By leveraging the technological superiority of its fibre optic cable network, the company has brought next generation internet speeds to 12.6 million homes throughout the country and is the only mass-market provider of ultrafast speeds in the UK. In addition, Virgin Media’s cable network means it is able to deliver very close to advertised headline speeds, unlike its ADSL competitors, or that claimed by other operators’ embryonic investment in fibre.

Just a heads up that Windows 7 RC will start displaying expiration notices in two weeks and users should reinstall with the RTM release or reinstall a previous version of Windows.

Effective February 15, 2010, the expiration notification process begins:

• Windows 7 RC users receive an expiration notification in the task bar one time per day.
• Windows 7 RC users are presented with the Notification Wizard one time every four hours and then one time every hour.

Effective March 1, 2010, Windows 7 RC enters the next phase of expiration:

• Expiration notifications in the task bar continue.
• Computers that are running Windows 7 RC restart every two hours.
  Important When the computer restarts, your work will not be saved.

Effective June 1, 2010, Windows 7 RC expires:

• Windows starts to a black desktop.
• Windows 7 RC users are presented with a Windows Activation screen. The screen states that the Windows that you are running is not genuine.
• Computers that are running Windows 7 RC restart every two hours.

Today as expected Mozilla Firefox 3.6 has been released and is “20% faster”. I’ve ran the Acid 3 test and scores 92/100 so is getting better with every release.

I would expect when version 4 is released it would finally pass the Acid 3 test.

Below are some of the new features.

• New Personas
• Outdated Plugin Detection
• Full Screen Open Video support
• Web open Font Format
• CSS Gradients and Backgrounds for Developers
• File API
• Drag and Drop
• Desktop Orientation Sensors
• Improved Speed

Download your copy today

The first major version of Firefox since 3.0 was released today as predicted by Neowin.net

So what’s new in 3.5? According to the release notes they are

• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey javascript engine.
• The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5, ‘video’ and ‘audio’ elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, javascript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

You can download the the new version from Mozilla’s website