An ankle sprain to Harbhajan has cast a cloud over India's hopes of having their first-choice attack back in action, following endless fitness issues in Sri Lanka. Dhoni said India will take a call on the offspinner on Friday morning. If Harbhajan does not make the cut, Pragyan Ojha will assume the role of lead spinner. Mohali's seamer-friendly reputation gives Sreesanth an opportunity to make the final XI as the third fast bowler, ahead of legspinner Amit Mishra. The batsmen pick themselves and, barring last-minute fitness issues, M Vijay and Cheteshwar Pujara are likely to sit out.
India (possible) 1 Virender Sehwag, 2 Gautam Gambhir, 3 Rahul Dravid, 4 Sachin Tendulkar, 5 VVS Laxman, 6 Suresh Raina, 7 MS Dhoni (capt and wk), 8 Harbhajan Singh / Amit Mishra / Sreesanth, 9 Zaheer Khan, 10 Ishant Sharma, 11 Pragyan Ojha
Australia are waiting to see how well Doug Bollinger and Michael Hussey train after their last-minute dash to India from the Champions League in South Africa. However, it would be a surprise if either man was left out. The only change from the team that lost to Pakistan at Headingley in July is likely to be the inclusion of Nathan Hauritz, who has recovered from his foot injury, at the expense of Steven Smith.
Australia (possible) 1 Shane Watson, 2 Simon Katich, 3 Ricky Ponting (capt), 4 Michael Clarke, 5 Michael Hussey, 6 Marcus North, 7 Tim Paine (wk), 8 Mitchell Johnson, 9 Nathan Hauritz, 10 Ben Hilfenhaus, 11 Doug Bollinger.
Facebook this week added a few updates to its "like" button that will make the feature a bit more pervasive on the site.
The three upgrades are directed primarily at developers, but users will see the results in their favorite apps, Pages, and on the Facebook news feed.
"Since we launched social plugins in April, we've been listening to user feedback and working with developers to optimize the Like button to make it as seamless as possible for people to like content around the web and share it with their friends," Facebook wrote in a blog post.
The first change will allow users to "like" something within an application. Did your friend get a high score on a game you both play? If the developer enables this functionality, you can "like" it. Anything you do "like" will be sent to the news feed, and anyone who clicks on that mention will be directed to the app in question, potentially generating more traffic for developers.
Second, Facebook has enabled the "like" button for Facebook Pages. A developer can opt to put a "Like button" or a "Like Box" on their site, and anyone who clicks on it will be directed to the developer's Facebook Page.
Finally, Facebook introduced a new "like" button that includes a box count, or the total number of likes the app has received. As Mashable pointed out, this might signal the end of the Facebook "Share" button, which was introduced in October and essentially does the same thing.
In other Facebook news, AllFacebook.com reports that Facebook has filed a patent application for a "social CAPTCHA" system. CAPTCHA's are the words that some Web sites ask you to type in before you enter a secure site or make an online purchase, for example. A "social" CAPTCHA would apparently ask you to identify something you should know - like the identify of someone in a photo - instead of typing in a bunch of letters.
-pc mag
The new iOS 4.1 update for the iPhone and iPod touch offers security fixes and new features on different models. But does the new operating system change the speed of the phones? After running five benchmarks, we found no significant speed gains or losses on an iPhone 4, 3GS or 3G.
The benchmarks were first executed on the phones running the previous version of iOS, version 4.02. We then upgraded all the phones to 4.1. After running the benchmarks in 4.1, we found speeds on the various tests remained within about 10 percent of the iOS 4.02 results. Click on the charts below to see the scores.
• Graph: Change in Performance
• Chart: Change in Performance
• Chart: iPhone 4 Scores
• Chart: iPhone 3GS Scores
• Chart: iPhone 3G Scores
Our benchmarks were split into three categories: processor and memory performance; application loading speed of a complex game; and Web browser performance.
Processor and Memory
BenchTest 1.4 ($0.99 in the iTunes store) tests memory allocation, floating point and integer calculation, 2D drawing performance using CoreGraphics, filesystem writes, and some JavaScript functions.
Geekbench 2 ($1.99 in the iTunes store) tests floating point and integer calculation and measures sustainable memory bandwidth and memory performance.
Application Load Time
"NFSU Launch" is the time for the device to launch "Need for Speed Undercover 1.2.0" ($4.99 in the iTunes store) to playable mode.
Web Browser Performance
SunSpider and V8 (version 5) are complex JavaScript benchmarks that test JavaScript runtime performance. The iPhone 3G could not run the entire V8 suite, so we picked two tests, "Richards" and "EarlyBoyer."
All tests were run with devices connected to a Wi-Fi network.
-pc mag.
