Pacquiao Captures Lightweight Belt

Photo from Philboxing.com

Filipino boxing icon Manny Pacquiao made history June 28 as he slugged it out on the square ring, outboxing then Lightweight Champion David Diaz and finally sending the Mexican-American fighter's face to the canvass late in the 9th round, to win the WBC Lightweight Championship of the World. Pacquiao is the first Filipino and Asian to capture the title, his fourth world title in four separate divisions, proving without question that he is the best pound-for-pound boxer of this age.

Pacquiao showed he was at the top of his game at the lightweight division -- considered for years as the holy grail of Philippine boxing. Filipino greats fell at this level, even the legendary Gabriel "Flash" Elorde.

But "The Pacman" was lightning fast at 135 pounds. The slow-motion replay could barely track a blur of a left hook that was the knockout punch smashing into Diaz's chiselled jaws. His gloves went limp as his face hit the ring floor. And while Pacquiao went to a neutral corner, referee motioned for the ring physician as Diaz struggled to get on his back. Just before the cornermen jumped into the ring -- Diaz's in bewilderment, Pacquiao's in jubilation -- the gentleman warrior approached his fallen foe and tried to help him get up.

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Manny Pacquiao's red right gloves flashed warning signs for the "Dangerous" David Diaz all through the first 8 rounds. But in the end, it was an unsuspecting left that leveled Diaz.

It was a convincing end. There were no scorecards to count, no controversial headbutts. Diaz took the fight to Pacquiao and stood up valiantly against the famed Filipino fighter. But this time the challenger proved too fast and too strong. Truly a lethal combination for the defending champ.

Get the blow-by-blow account at Yahoo! Sports.

And here's some great stories of the fight over at Pacquiao's own website.

Congratulations to the pinoy boxing hero Manny Pacquiao!

The Domain Gold Rush Is On

Soon enough you can get your very own top-level domain (TLD) name on the Internet.

Domain regulator Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved unanimously a proposal to open up restrictions on top-level domain names. This means that Web addresses won't be limited to just the ".com", ".net", ".org" or some of the other popular TLDs in existence. With the new system anyone can apply for having a customized TLD like ".cars", ".paris" or ".blog". The news is eBay is already poised to take ".ebay".

Currently there are 21 top-level domain names, 7 of which may be used without restrictions - ".com", ".net", ".org", ".info", ".name", ".pro" and ".name". The other TLDs are either reserved for special purposes or otherwise considered sponsored and limited to select groups only.

The new ICANN gTLD Strategy will pave the way for a huge expansion of the Internet with thousands of new domains available for every conceivable industry and purpose. Global brand names are expected to lead in this virtual gold rush. Various industries will be competing for control over their respective fields, for example ".hotels" or ".shipping".

The other important innovation of the strategy involves allowing the use of non-Roman characters for Internet addressing. Thus, Asian countries like China, Japan and Korea as well as Arab nations and Eastern European nations that use different character sets may soon have Internet addresses in their own languages.

Reactions to the new Internet system are mixed. Many express a sigh of relief as this would allow registrants to take on a domain which may already have been taken mostly by so-called Web squatters and domain hoarders. It also means that the importance of ".com" will be diluted over time and websites will be more uniquely addressed. Many new TLDs have been applied to the ICANN body in the past due to the limitations of the handful of TLDs available to the Internet. Attempts at a similar multiple-root domain system have been proposed before most notably by the UnifiedRoot group.

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On the flipside, there are those who foresee a fallout of confusion as Internet users might have a difficult time distinguishing which website to go to after a search much like trying to figure out which John Smith to call up when looking at a telephone directory. Some brand owners are also concerned with an anticipated bedlam in registering their brands across an endless range of TLDs and how that will affect the protection of their respective intellectual property rights.

ICANN officials are dispelling the worries saying that they have taken all aspects of the strategy in consideration and are essentially prepared for any inevitability. The ICANN cites they are putting objection-based mechanisms in place to ensure viability of the new domain system. You can peruse the ICANN official statement from their website.

As a final note, it would take a while before domain buyers can place their stake at a brand-new top-level domain. ICANN estimates the infrastructure to be setup and functional by late 2009 with registrants required to shell out top-dollars in the 6-figure amounts.

Firefox 3 Launched

Mozilla's much maligned yet more beloved web browser launches it's third full version June 17th worldwide as the Firefox 3 tries to set a new Guinness World Record for the most downloads in a single day.

Before the start of Download Day 2008 it already had over 3 million pledges for downloads from Firefox fans around the world. The campaign ends June 18th at 5PM UTC. With a few more hours to go it looks like its well on its way on hitting its mark. However, a handful of pledgers have expressed disappointment for the lack of organization for the Download Day event with complaints ranging from the availability of downloads being late by as much as 17 hours to "Page Not Found" errors for certain language versions at the official download site. Some have even stated that their installation crashed.

Personally, I've beta-tested the FF3 prior to Download Day 2008 and it worked with no hitches thus far. I've thus made my download June 18 Philippine time and it's so far working fine. What I appreciate most about this version is the Bookmark Tags feature which lets you organize your bookmarks with keyword tags. So you can have for example a bookmark folder labeled "Blogs" but you can still tag individual blogs into regions or topics like say "Blogging Tips" or "Cooking". Entering the keyword tag on the address bar will bring up all bookmarks tagged as such even if they were saved under different folders.

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Another interesting feature is the full-screen mode which is really full-screen. Previously when pressing F-11 (full-screen mode short-cut) the navigation toolbar and tabs remain on screen. Now everything hides off your screen's edges, leaving only the unobstructed website page in all it's glory.

Pity though, Firefox 3 is no longer available for lower versions of Windows. So I'll have to be content with the FF2 series for my other ancient P-III Win98 machine.

Firefox as we know it have been around since 2004 with its 1.0 release. This latest Firefox 3 is boasted to contain more than 15,000 improvements and is expected to be faster, smarter and more secure with the latest anti-phishing, anti-malware and pop-up blocker technologies.

Go get your Firefox 3 today.