Geekz

Google Relevance meets the real-time web

Murali Kumar — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:09:25 -0800

via googleblog.blogspot.com

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The Journey of a Tweet

Murali Kumar — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:57:10 -0800

via i903.photobucket.com

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Indian innovator builds a car which can run on air. Forget petrol or diesel to run your car.

Murali Kumar — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:52:00 -0800

Kanak Gogoi, an undergraduate entrepreneur from Guwahati,assam of india has over a dozen innovations, from gravity-operated bicycle to a car which can run on air,The engine is run purely on compressed air and is incredibly cost-effective. But he regrets that Indian government's negligence towards scientific innovations, and refuses to commercialize any of his creations.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offered to build a fully furnished lab for him in Guwahati and the Government had granted him about 1.6 acres of land in 2007, but the file is still lying untouched at the local administrative office."

Another of Gogoi's invention is the speed breaker that can generate electricity simply when vehicles pass over it. A vehicle weighing one tonne can create electricity equivalent to one kilowatt.

In the past 13 years, he has spent 3.2244 million USD of his own money to satisfy his scientific and engineering curiosities, but steadfastly refuses to commercialize any of them and blames the government for not promoting scientific innovations.

"I have a successful real estate business, which affords me the luxury of having enough spare money and spare time to concentrate on my engineering activities. I don't expect and nor do I wish for any monetary returns," said Gogoi, who had refused an invitation from a North Carolina-based organization to shift to their campus with a daily stipend of $1,000.

Gogoi says, "However, I have never received a single rupee in profit for any of my work and I will never venture to commercialize them on my own. But if anybody is willing, he is free to make use of my innovations for the greater good of the society.

Among his innovations are a solar hybrid car, whose 320 watt battery is charged by solar panels and is powered by a 100cc engine. Another car that Gogoi made from integration of motorcycle and Maruti 800 engines, runs on air energy powered by a hand glider and can reach a maximum speed of 120 km per hour.

Check out the article I found at siliconindia.com

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Your Twitter account and its Marketing Potential

Murali Kumar — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:17:54 -0800

Twitter Has Lots of Marketing Potential

I have had more time to use Twitter and to research and try new ways to utilize it for marketing. Now I feel that Twitter is indeed worth the time. If used properly it can definitely help with your marketing efforts. It is not an end-all marketing silver bullet or panacea. Instead, it could make a good addition to your social media marketing toolbox. Here are ten excellent ways to use Twitter for marketing:

Use it to promote new pieces of content you or your company create to drive traffic to your site. From online articles to blog posts or from videos to webinars, each time you add something to the Web that is of value, tweet about it and include a link. (Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.)

Use it for learning new marketing ideas, strategies and techniques. If you follow the right people, and you have to be picky about who you follow, you’ll get pointed to a good amount of useful tutorials, videos, e-zines and other things that teach you about marketing.

Use it to get new customers. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in your product or service.

There are many ingenious ways to search for people on Twitter. For example, if you sell red widgets you could go to http://search.twitter.com and find people who have tweeted specifically looking for red widgets. To do this, type the following into the search box: red widgets ?

You’ll notice a lot of the results will be of others selling red widgets. These ones will all obviously have links in them to direct people to the site they’re selling red widgets on. To weed these people/tweets out, use the negative sign like this: -http red widgets ?
Since every link has ‘http’ in it, using the negative sign in front of it will cause your search results to not include any tweets with links in them.

Use it to build your email list. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in the monthly newsletter you send out to your opt-in house email list. Invite these people to join.

Utilize Twitter plugins or add-ons such as TweetMyBlog or The Twitter Updater, which both automatically make tweets of every new blog post you publish. Also check out TwitThis. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the Web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their followers on Twitter. Finally, look at TweetLater, a service that allows you to write lots of tweets at once and then schedule them to go out over time.

Use it to build buzz about an upcoming product or website launch.

Use it to better brand yourself or your business. Remember, when someone wants to learn more about you or your company, they are increasingly using sites like Twitter for research. You could easily use Twitter to establish yourself as an authority in your field.

Use it to update followers on breaking news regarding your company. If your company is mentioned in a new article, tweet about it and include a link to the article. Or if you’re at a conference or trade show, you could tweet what you’re doing and invite people to visit you in person.

Use it for business networking, master-mind groups (see Napoleon Hill), and getting yourself seen by high-profile people in your industry.

Use it as an instant messaging system to keep your and your team on the same page during projects. This is especially useful for those who work with teams spread out in different cities or countries.

via jasonoconnor.com

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Snow Leopard beats Windows 7

Murali Kumar — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:13:00 -0700

I have a confession: I'm a switcher. My long journey with Windows, which began even before Windows with MS-DOS, ended with Windows Vista. While so many others navigated the Vista debacle by sticking with Windows XP, I gave Vista a try -- and gave up. I leapt to the Mac OS.

Could Windows 7 lure me back?

Windows 7 was built to fix the problems that plagued Vista, and it unquestionably succeeds in doing that. It's a bit less bloated, and it runs a bit faster. The annoying security alerts from User Account Control have been quieted. And the compatibility issues with third-party software and hardware device drivers have largely been ironed away; after all, it's been two and a half years since Vista debuted. Windows 7 even includes a virtual "XP mode" for running legacy programs.

[ Which is better? The Mac OS and Windows 7 UIs face off. | Get InfoWorld's 21-page hands-on look at the next version of Windows, from InfoWorld’s editors and contributors. | Find out what's new, what's wrong, and what's good about Windows 7 in InfoWorld's "Windows 7: The essential guide." ]

Windows 7 goes a few steps beyond merely repairing Vista. It borrows --and improves on -- tricks from the Mac's playbook to make it easier and faster to organize files and launch programs. Like Apple's operating system, Windows 7 not only looks good, but it has tools and shortcuts that help you work more efficiently. If there were ever a Windows that could challenge Mac OS X, Windows 7 is it.

Still, once you've had Mac, can you ever go back? Mac OS X Leopard received rave reviews for good reason, and Snow Leopard further improved OS X. Although the changes to the GUI are minimal (why mess with success?), there are important improvements under the hood, including a recoded, 64-bit Finder that takes better advantage of multicore processors. Snow Leopard also makes the Mac a better fit with PC-oriented businesses with integrated Mail, Address Book, and iCal support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

After spending a few weeks with both new operating systems and exposing each to my geek's gauntlet of everyday tasks -- e-mail, instant messaging, Web surfing, blogging, creating and editing Office documents, Web page creation, and audio, video, and photo editing -- I have to call Snow Leopard the winner. All considered, from starting up to backing up, Mac OS X still offers the best overall user experience. The competition was close, though -- far closer than it's been in quite a while.

Test Center Scorecard

20% 20% 20% 15% 15% 10%

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard 10 8 9 10 9 10

9.3

Excellent

20% 20% 20% 15% 15% 10%

Microsoft Windows 7 10 9 9 9 8 9

9.1

Excellent

via infoworld.com

Test Center Scorecard

	20%	20%	20%	15%	15%	10%
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard	10	8	9	10	9	10	9.3 Excellent
	20%	20%	20%	15%	15%	10%
Microsoft Windows 7	10	9	9	9	8	9	9.1 Excellent

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How Users Took Over Twitter

Murali Kumar — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:22:24 -0700

Illustration: Christoph Niemann

Last August, the people who putatively run Twitter — the small crew that three years ago launched the world’s fastest-growing communications medium — announced a relatively minor change in the way the site functions. The tweak would have a small effect on retweeting, the convention by which Twitter users repost someone else’s informative or amusing message to their own Twitter followers. Retweets start with RT, for “retweet,” and usually cite the first author by user ID. And, importantly, retweeters often add a word or two of commentary about the repeated content.

But there was a problem: Twitter itself didn’t invent retweeting; it was created by Twitter users. In a blog post explaining the changes to retweets, the company’s second-in-command, Biz Stone, called them “a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.” The good news, he said, was that Twitter was building retweets right into the site’s architecture. The bad news was that Project Retweet didn’t make any provision for the commentary that users might like to add.

It didn’t take long for Twitter users to respond: How dare Twitter mess with … Twitter. A self-described “social, search, and viral marketing scientist” named Dan Zarrella posted a passionate cri de coeur, writing that Twitter was about to “completely eviscerate most of the value out of retweets.” That night, Zarrella created a Twitter hashtag — another grassroots Twitter convention, which lets users group their conversations — called #saveretweets. A few tweeters liked the plan, but the general consensus was summed up by one user skilled in Twitter’s uncompromising brevity: “Very bad plan we hates it.”

The Retweet Incident is a distillation of how Twitter has come so far so fast — and how tricky it might be to keep the momentum going. In an amazingly short time, the messaging service — which does little more than circulate bursts of text limited to 140 characters to a list of people who have chosen to receive them — has established itself as a staple of social networking, commerce, electioneering, celebrity culture, public relations, media, and political protest. According to internal documents leaked earlier this year, the company expects to have 25 million active users by the end of 2009 and 100 million by the end of 2010. In 2013, it hopes to become the first Internet service to sign up 1 billion users.

There’s a big difference between 1 million adherents — roughly the number of people who receive tweets from Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams, whose recent messages reported the birth of his first child — and 1 billion, which puts you up there with Google and soccer. Can something as elementary as Twitter become an enduring pillar of the Internet?

Perhaps, but Williams and Stone are going about it in an unusual way. They’re not laser-focused on how to fend off companies like Facebook and Google — which are madly integrating Twitter into their own business plans even as they take steps to neutralize or maybe buy it. And they don’t seem to be worried about money. The company’s revenue will be a modest $4 million or so this year. Even so, Twitter reportedly turned down a $500 million acquisition offer from Facebook last November and seems perfectly happy to burn through its roughly $150 million in investor funds.

Instead, Williams and Stone spend lots of time concocting schemes to boost the happiness quotient of a workforce that’s still only in the double figures — stuff like free lunches and inspirational visits by politicians, folksingers, and a director from the TV show House. The idea is to establish a corporate culture that will abide even when the number of employees explodes. “I feel like we’re 1 percent into this,” Stone says. “We don’t want to be that child actor who finds success early and grows up to be weird.”

But Twitter is already weird: It rocketed into the mainstream without really knowing what its service was. Its users defined it. It was those users who made Twitter into a throbbing global sensing organism that delivers instant opinion and eyewitness reporting on everything from presidential debates to football injuries. Though the company held a discussion earlier this year called “What Do We Want to Be When We Grow Up?” the mission statement is still a work in progress. “If there are three sentences I’d use to describe Twitter,” Stone says, “one of them would be ‘I don’t know.’”

As the company pursues those billion users and a business model, however, it may need to move past a studied ignorance of what it wants to be and shape its product more aggressively. The challenge is to do that without alienating the very community that’s fueling the company’s rocket-ship ascent.

Just a few years after its July 2006 launch, Twitter has ridden a wave of publicity (and serendipity) that few startups can dream of. A look back at some milestones on the path to social-networking supremacy. — Erik Malinowski
Chart source: Comscore Media Metrix

It’s easy to write off Twitter as a happy accident, a right-place, right-time fluke. But that misses the point. When Twitter’s creators designed the service, they made a series of crucial and deliberate decisions — ones that seem brilliant in retrospect — that created the conditions that allow users to innovate.

The first was a commitment to simplicity. A little history: Williams’ previous company was a podcasting venture called Odeo. After Apple started distributing podcasts in June 2005, Odeo was pretty much redundant, so Williams started looking for a new idea. Jack Dorsey, one of his engineers, had one for him: status updates — specifically, brief reports that answered questions like: Where are you? What are you doing?

Dorsey suggested a system that mimicked the simplicity of SMS to let users send messages from the Web or their cell phones about what they were doing from wherever they were. In March 2006, a small group including Dorsey and Stone built a prototype in two weeks. “The important thing was that we spent a lot of time getting it down to its essence,” says Noah Glass, a cofounder of Odeo who managed the so-called Twttr project. The system would receive a message from the sender and then forward it to the right people. Nothing else. Simple.

The second key decision was crucial: creating asymmetry between writers and followers. They didn’t need to be “friends” or in any way on equal footing. Anyone could read a writer’s updates, and that was powerfully liberating. “One thing I didn’t like about social networks was that awkwardness of friend requests,” Williams says. He wanted Twitter to be more like blogging, where readers pay attention to whatever they like. “That frees up creators, because they can do anything they want,” he says.

The implications were profound — and unexpected. No one thought people would want to follow strangers, or that celebrities would use Twitter to apprise fans of their activities, or that businesses would use Twitter to announce discounts or launch new products. Allowing unrestricted following eventually meant that P. Diddy could share the progress of a tantric sex session with a hundred thousand followers, and the Kennedy family could use Twitter to keep the public informed about developments in Uncle Teddy’s funeral. It obliterated the line between confidant and audience.

The third key decision was to open up Twitter to software developers from the get-go, allowing them to build their own apps and services. They could even build sites that replaced the Twitter homepage with a spiffier, more functional interface. “It just seemed like geeks would hack on it, and it would be cool,” Stone says. “We didn’t know that it was going to be a whole giant thing.”

Outsiders have enhanced the value of Twitter in countless ways, like creating software dashboards that let users navigate the Twitterverse the way a Las Vegas security honcho monitors the casino floor. Other services allow you to link tweets to pictures or video. Twitter has also led to a boom in URL-shortening services, a former backwater of Web utilities, which became vital when people wanted to include links in their tweets without the URL taking up half the space. “There may be some 50 people officially working at Twitter, but it’s more like 5,000 people work for Twitter, and they all deserve as much credit as we do,” Stone says.

The most transformative hack has been the ability to search through millions of tweets, even those posted just seconds earlier. It means anyone can monitor the hottest current topic of discussion or simply get a sense of what people are saying, in real time, about a product or movie or celebrity. A Virginia company called Summize was one of several to come up with a way to search Twitter. The technology turned out to be so important that Twitter acquired Summize and hired nearly all of its engineers.

Twitter’s evolution spawned a new grammar, and the Twitter community created many of the conventions now integral to the service. This includes hashtags (marked with a # symbol) and the @ prefix before a username. Companies using Twitter to track financial information adopted the $ sign to identify stock names. Heavy retweeting by tech guru Tim O’Reilly helped popularize the practice.

To Twitter fans, 140 characters wasn’t a limit but a jumping-off point. It might have seemed obvious that something as brief and ephemeral as a tweet was unsuitable for a press release, policy analysis, or novel, but people have used Twitter for these things anyway, sending multitweet streams that constituted a brand-new Internet genre.

Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked on the sidelines as its users invented baseball.

Illustration: Christoph Niemann

If Twitter is going to make any money, however, the company has to take its own turn at bat. For most of the past two years, the focus has been simply to keep things running, reducing the nettlesome downtime that plagued the service and stemming the rising tide of spam. “We’re finally emerging from this firefighting mode,” Stone says. From here on, the company wants to put its own mark on the service, improving its homepage, producing services of its own, and refining the best ideas of its users — like retweeting.

The company has gone on a hiring spree: Recent arrivals include Douglas Bowman, a key Google designer; Alex Macgillivray, a former top lawyer at Google, who will handle possible technology acquisitions; and new COO Dick Costolo, cofounder of newsfeed company FeedBurner. Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos is an investor. And after closing a round of $100 million funding in September, the company will certainly hire and grow even more. As it does, it will need to balance humility and ambition. “We don’t want to get too clever and think we know everything,” Stone says. “But maybe we can serve our developers better by creating the real future they want.”

Of course, those developers won’t be too happy if Twitter winds up competing with them. And users may not embrace Twitter’s attempts at improvement. Every move the company makes comes under harsh scrutiny. Consider something as innocuous as its Suggested Users List, a collection of roughly 200 Twittering celebrities, companies, and experts that the service flags as an interesting starting point for novices. It was unveiled last February. Outrage ensued. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis (who has never made the list) saw it as an unearned gift to favored users and offered to buy three years of inclusion in the top 20 for half a million bucks. Tech legend Dave Winer, who describes himself as one of the site’s biggest fans, was alarmed by the company’s ability to alienate its core users in such a way. “We need to get that power out of their hands,” he wrote on his blog.

Stone and Williams hope to minimize such tensions. But they also need to assert some control over their own product. After all, there’s only so much you can do when millions of your users access your service in a way that bypasses your homepage. And, unbelievably, Twitter doesn’t even make an app for cell phones or other mobile gadgets, basically ceding that development to outsiders. “It’s nice to have the ecosystem out there innovating,” says Kevin Thau, the Twitter exec in charge of mobile. “It has created this whole communications system where people are saying, ‘What Twitter client do you use? Which one do you like?’”

It’s not that Twitter lacks ambition. The scale of its vision was revealed last summer when a hacker stole hundreds of the company’s confidential documents and leaked them to TechCrunch. The key bullet point, straight from a February 2009 strategy meeting: “If we had a billion users, that will be the pulse of the planet.”

Considering how far Twitter has come, that audacious boast is a plausible goal. (Another bullet point from the leaked memo, “Are we building a new Internet?” is a stretch.) Twitter envisions building its international audience by making deals with carriers to sell phones with Twitter connectivity built straight into the browser or texting functions. (This will help boost Twitter use in developing nations, where SMS still rules.) The company also envisions delivering content from Twitter to and from every connected device in your life, like radios and game consoles. Pulse of the planet indeed.

That’s why competing Internet giants are deeply interested in, if not outright obsessed by, Twitter. Over the past few months, Facebook has made alterations that reek of Twitter envy, like the ability to make status reports available to all Facebook users and adopting the @ sign for usernames. A stripped-down version of its service, Facebook Lite, seems to show that when Facebook is reduced to its essence, you get a real-time feed that looks like a close cousin of Twitter.

Google has made suspiciously Twitter-oriented adjustments as well. One is something called PubSubHubbub, a server protocol that could instantly push new content to users, whether it’s from a blog, Facebook, instant messaging, or Twitter. This has the potential to blunt Twitter’s uniqueness by commoditizing short bursts of information: Instead of a Twitterverse, we’d have a Statusphere distributed across dozens, even hundreds, of companies.

These plans suggest that all kinds of content could be Twitterized. It’s like email, Winer argues. It shouldn’t belong to anyone. On his blog, he suggested an open system that duplicates Twitter messages and puts them in a bucket with posts from “140-character networks formed by others, including Facebook, Yahoo, Google, who knows who.”

Williams and Stone, as you’d suspect, don’t want Twitter to become a commodity. They want to amplify Twitter so it’s as vital to your social life as Facebook and as important to your search as Google. “We want to make Twitter indispensable, so it tells people what they need to know and what they want to know and hopefully not much else,” Williams says.

If Twitter does that, he believes, the company will be wildly profitable, no matter what the skeptics say. Last summer Williams was invited to the exclusive Allen & Company confab of bigwigs in Sun Valley, Idaho. He was astonished to hear Barry Diller and John Malone, two pillars of the pre-Internet world, proclaiming that Twitter would never make much money. “I didn’t argue my case,” Williams says. “But all the Internet guys there were laughing at those media guys. Are you kidding? Do you understand how money flows to the Internet? When you know that Twitter is a vehicle for directing information and traffic to large audiences, you realize there’s obviously a huge business.”

What is that business? Twitter isn’t talking much about it, although a recent change in its terms of service opens the door to financially exploiting Twitter’s assets. Stone does say that the first stab at serious revenue will be providing services to businesses that use Twitter, helping them analyze discussions and providing them with “verified accounts” to let them communicate with customers. That doesn’t sound like much: Twitter will probably make more bucks with Google-like targeted ads, one of the other possibilities mentioned in the purloined documents. Maybe the most promising revenue streams will come from packaging and analyzing the information from the billions of tweets that are collected exclusively on Twitter’s servers. “We have a hell of a lot of data right now,” Williams says. “And we’ll have an unfathomable amount in five years.” Given those possibilities, the revenue goal outlined in the leaked memos — generating a dollar per user — doesn’t seem overly ambitious. Williams even sees a bright side to the theft of the documents. “Ironically, they may have dispelled the misperception that the company is frivolous or a flash in the pan,” he says. When he envisions Twitter five years from now, he sees an independent, profitable business with thousands of employees. “We definitely will be bigger and better, and hopefully that’s about it,” he says.

Of course, the strength of Twitter is that the company already has thousands of people defining and redefining it every day. And Williams doesn’t have to supply them with a desk or free food. Whether he can keep that workforce happy is a story that will unfold, 140 characters at a time, over the next few years.

Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com) wrote about tech executives in Iraq in issue 17.08.

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via wired.com

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President Barack Obama and his family portrait

Murali Kumar — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:12:00 -0700

via flickr.com

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How to choose a religion: the flow chart

Murali Kumar — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:02:57 -0700

via files.posterous.com

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WOW! Real-time comment search is live on YouTube

Murali Kumar — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:43:32 -0700

Now you can search across wacky YouTube comments to find out what vloggers say about you. And because YouTube chews all the comments all the time, you also get trending topics in a Twitter fashion. Welcome to the real web…

Thanks to the New York Times’ insider, we now know that YouTube has quietly slipped a new feature Friday night that lets you perform real-time search across all the comments posted in all of YouTube’s videos. Although YouTube and Google announced no such feature in their official communication, the publication noted that the comment search functionality is now enabled via a dedicated comment search page.

Indeed, we were able to access the feature at press time and it seemed pretty straightforward. You simply enter your query in a large search box to get the list of matching comments from all YouTube videos. For an example comment search for Apple’s alleged Apple tablet, click here. The results are updated continuously and there’s even a handy link that refreshes your results with new comments that appeared since you started searching.

You can also set to show comments in all languages and click on a couple of trending topics that are currently hot on YouTube. Unlike the main YouTube search that has a results feed, the real-time comment search lacked such capability at press time. I advise you to try the real-time comment search feature now before YouTube takes it down.

Read more at the New York Times

Christian’s Opinion

An example comment search on YouTube.

Twitter and Facebook have taught us that real-time is so much better than the content acquired in set intervals. Frankly, I’ve always wondered why is it taking so long to bake more of the Google search engine into the $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition? And now that real-time search is live on YouTube, I’m wondering why Google’s main search page still lacks Twitter-like trending topics? True, there’s an experimental trending feature in the Google Labs section, but as long as it’s off the main search page, average users will miss it.

When it comes to YouTube, businesses could easily use the new real-time comment search to discover the latest buzz in the world’s largest clearinghouse for amateur videos.

Likewise, companies could use it to feel the community vibe and gauge public interest for their products cunningly promoted in viral videos. Whichever way you look at it, we now live in the real-time online world. With companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook making a splash with real-time information, there’s no going back to the “old days.”

via geek.com

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10 things that still need fixing in Windows 7

Murali Kumar — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:25:00 -0700

1. Overall consistency
For a Microsoft product, Windows 7 is quite refined. But it still suffers from needless inconsistency. Why do most of its tools place menus on the left, while Internet Explorer 8 and the help system shove them over to the opposite end? Does the new media-sharing feature (HomeGroup) have zero, one, or two capital letters? Why does Office 2007's Ribbon interface show up only in Paint and WordPad?

2. The names of things
Too often, Microsoft's naming decisions confuse rather than clarify. "User Account Control" has nothing to do with the feature it supposedly describes; "Action Center" sounds like Ron Burgundy's local TV newscast. And an OS that already has a feature called Device Manager shouldn't call a new feature "Devices and Printers."

3. Windows Update
The operating system's built-in patching capability is essential. But Windows Update is also the OS's most irritating carryover feature. Tell it to download and install everything without your further intervention (as Microsoft recommends), and it may still insist on rebooting when you are in the middle of important work — or deny you access to your computer altogether while it installs updates.

4. Search
Windows 7's Federated Search lets you add external sources like Flickr and YouTube to Windows Explorer searches. But the OS doesn't help you find those sources and doesn't mention Federated Search in its help system.

5. Help
Help ... needs help. Some sections target nerdy command-line aficionados; others address clueless newbies. Few sections focus on intelligent-but-busy users of intermediate experience.

6. Flip3D
Press Windows-Tab, and you get Vista's fancy 3D task switcher, which pointlessly requires you to cycle through tasks one by one. This duplicates the functionality of Alt-Tab instead of enabling you to get to any task in a couple of clicks, as Apple's similar Exposé does.

7. Backup
Win 7's Backup and Restore Center no longer requires you to devote an external hard drive to a full system backup. But it still isn't as easy to use as Apple's Time Machine. And Microsoft's decision to put network backup only in Windows 7's priciest editions is just silly.

8. Versionitis

Having multiple versions of Windows is fine in theory. But in reality, their minor, subtle, and arbitrary differences invite confusion. Misleading names like Windows 7 Home Premium — the only Windows 7 Home version available in the United States — don't help.

9. Internet Explorer 8
Windows 7's bundled browser is perfectly adequate. But it's playing catch-up with innovative competitors such as Firefox and Google's Chrome, not setting new standards.

10. Document viewing
Like Vista, Windows 7 lets you create application-independent documents that use Microsoft's PDF-like XPS format to retain their original formatting. But PDF is pervasive and XPS hasn't caught on, so wouldn't it be infinitely more convenient if Windows 7 supported PDF out of the box?

via msnbc.msn.com

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70+ Free iPhone Wallpaper : Creative 3d Designs

Murali Kumar — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:46:35 -0700

The iPhone has to be the most popular tech gadget that has been released in the past few years. As a telephone, a messaging tool or a multimedia device, the iPhone serves a purpose for everyone. One of the biggest reasons this device has gained so much popularity is because of its ability to be customized to it’s user’s personal taste. iPhone wallpapers allows users to bring customization to another level. Displaying unique 3d wallpaper such as these featured give users a sense of individuality with a device that everyone seems to have.

Want more customization for your apple iPhone? Check out some of my previous post on iPhones.

Enhance your Apple iPhone with these beautiful free themes

Dress up your Apple Iphone with these Gorgeous iphone skins

3d Girls

Final Fantasy Iphone Wallpaper

Iphone Wallpaper: Pepper Love

Sprite

Robobabe Iphone Wallpaper

Girl on Fire

Iphone Wallpaper: Sexy Gypsy

3D Cowgirl

3D Fantasy Girl Iphone Wallpaper

Light & Dark Side

Beautiful 3D Model

Iphone Wallpaper: 3D Gothic Character

3d Robots

Recharging Cyborg Iphone Wallpaper

Cyborg Head

Transformers Battle Iphone Wallpaper

Iphone Wallpaper: Veritech

Ironman Charged Wallpaper

Mazinger Z Robot

Futuristic Iphone Wallpaper

Iphone Wallpaper: Angry Robot

Rock and Roll Tape iPhone Wallpaper

Jumping Robots

A Patient Robot

iphonetoolbox

Iphone Wallpaper: 3D Silver Robot

Iphone Wallpaper: Crysis

Octane 8

Raging Bull Wallpaper

3d Abstract Art

Trendwhore Twirl iPhone Wallpaper

Null Flow iPhone Wallpaper

Input Output

Iphone Wallpaper: Color Extrude

Sphere Threads

V3RSTA3RK3R iPhone Wallpaper

Aqua Abstract iPhone Wallpaper

iuneWind Color Picker iPhone Wallpaper

Color Explosion

3-D Blossoms

Cities and Landscapes

Floating City

Iphone Wallpaper: Water Bowl City

Head World Wallpaper

Caged City

City Street

Future City Iphone Wallpaper

3D Tree Building iPhone Wallpaper

Arctic Home

3d Typography

Little World iPhone Wallpaper

Love in the Air iPhone Wallpaper

3D Stylish Creative iPhone Wallpaper

Lucky Eight

Play-Theme for Iphone

3d Characters

Sonic

Up - Flying Away

Up - Carl Fredrickson

Iphone Wallpaper: 3D Chef Gordon Ramsey

Viva Cute Baby iPhone Wallpaper

Tamanimals iPhone Wallpaper

Kung Fu Panda Wallpaper

Ratatouille

Iphone Wallpaper

Hungry Fellow

3D GoldFish iPhone Wallpaper

Sonic Adventure

3D Boy + Butterfly

Freaky Chick

Alien Star iPhone Wallpaper

3D Angry Masked Character

Miscellaneous

Paint Cans

1000 Mile Stare

Rocking Out

Which wallpaper will make it on your iPhone? Why not tell us by leaving a comment.

via designrfix.com

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Samsung AMOLED 12M Officially Announced

Murali Kumar — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 11:56:27 -0700

via technical-tejash.blogspot.com

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Microsoft was fucking my firefox browser in background

Murali Kumar — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 08:48:00 -0700

Microsoft exposes Firefox users to drive-by malware downloads

Remember that Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant add-on that Microsoft sneaked into Firefox without explicit permission from end users?

Well, the code in that add-on has a serious code execution vulnerability that exposes Firefox users to the “browse and you’re owned” attacks that are typically used in drive-by malware downloads.

[ SEE: Patch Tuesday: MS plugs critical IE, Windows Media Player holes ]

The flaw was addressed in the MS09-054 bulletin that covered “critical” holes in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer but, as Redmond’s Security Research & Defense team explains, the drive-by download risk extends beyond Microsoft’s browser.

A browse-and-get-owned attack vector exists. All that is needed is for a user to be lured to a malicious website. Triggering this vulnerability involves the use of a malicious XBAP (XAML Browser Application). Please not that while this attack vector matches one of the attack vectors for MS09-061, the underlying vulnerability is different. Here, the affected process is the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) hosting process, PresentationHost.exe.

While the vulnerability is in an IE component, there is an attack vector for Firefox users as well. The reason is that .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installs a “Windows Presentation Foundation” plug-in in Firefox.

Now, Microsoft’s security folks are actually recommending that Firefox users uninstall the buggy add-on:

For Firefox users with .NET Framework 3.5 installed, you may use “Tools”-> “Add-ons” -> “Plugins”, select “Windows Presentation Foundation”, and click “Disable”.

This introduction of vulnerabilities in a competing browser is a colossal embarrassment for Microsoft. At the time of the surreptitious installs, there were prescient warnings from many in the community about the security implications of introducing new code into browsers without the knowledge — and consent — of end users.

[ SEE: Microsoft says Google Chrome Frame doubles IE attack surface ]

This episode also underscores some of the hypocrisy that has risen to the surface in the new browser wars. When Google announced it would introduce a plug-in that runs Google Chrome inside Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Microsoft whipped out the security card and warned that Google’s move increased IE’s attack surface.

“Given the security issues with plug-ins in general and Google Chrome in particular, Google Chrome Frame running as a plug-in has doubled the attach area for malware and malicious scripts. This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.”

Of course, when it’s Microsoft introducing the security risk to other browsers (Silverlight, anyone?), we should all just grin and take it.

* Image via DevExpress. Hat tip to Gregg Keizer.

via blogs.zdnet.com

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Olympic 2010 medals made from recycled circuit boards

Murali Kumar — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:30:54 -0700

The just-unveiled medals for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver certainly break with a few conventions in terms of appearance, but it looks like they also contain a few surprises that aren't immediately apparent -- namely, they're all made at least partly from recycled circuit boards. Of course, the circuit boards have also been recycled beyond recognition, but each of the medals do apparently sport a one of a kind design, not to mention some considerable heft (weighing between 500 and 576 grams apiece). Sure, it's not enough to make a dent in the e-waste problem, but it's a heckuva way to kick start a trend.
[Via Technabob]

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Kaspersky calls for end to internet anonymity

Murali Kumar — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 02:22:08 -0700

The CEO of Russia's No. 1 anti-virus package has said that the internet's biggest security vulnerability is anonymity, calling for mandatory internet passports that would work much like driver licenses do in the offline world.

The comments by Eugene Kaspersky, who is also the founder of Kaspersky Lab, came during an interview this week with Vivian Yeo of ZDNet Asia. In it, he proposed the formation of an internet police body that would require users everywhere to be uniquely identified.

"Everyone should and must have an identification, or internet passport," he was quoted as saying. "The internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the US military. Then it was introduced to the public and it was wrong...to introduce it in the same way."

Kaspersky, whose comments are raising the eyebrows of some civil liberties advocates, went on to say such a system shouldn't be voluntary.

"I'd like to change the design of the internet by introducing regulation - internet passports, internet police and international agreement - about following internet standards," he continued. "And if some countries don't agree with or don't pay attention to the agreement, just cut them off."

He rejected the notion that internet protocol numbers were sufficient for tracking a user, arguing they are too easy to come by.

"You're not sure who exactly has the connection," he explained. "Even if the IP address is traced to an internet cafe, they will not know who the customer or person is behind the attacks. Think about cars - you have plates on cars, but you also have driver licenses."

Kaspersky was traveling on Friday and not available to be interviewed for this article. A company spokeswoman declined to comment.

Kaspersky admitted such a system would be hard to put in place because of the cost and difficulty of reaching international agreements. But remarkably, his interview transcript spends no time contemplating the inevitable downsides that would come in a world where internet anonymity is a thing of the past.

"You could make the same argument about the offline world," said Matt Zimmerman, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "You know, every purchase you make should be tracked, we should ban the use of cash, we should put cameras up everywhere because in that massive data collection something might be collected to help someone. But we think privacy is an important enough countervailing value that we should prevent that."

In Kaspersky's world, services such as Psiphon and The Onion Router (Tor) - which are legitimately used by Chinese dissidents and Google users alike to shield personally identifiable information - would no longer be legal. Or at least they'd have to be redesigned from the ground up to give police the ability to surveil them. That's not the kind of world many law-abiding citizens would feel comfortable inhabiting.

And aside from the disturbing big-brother scenario, there are the problematic logistics of requiring every internet user anywhere in the world to connect using an internationally approved device that authenticates his unique identity. There's no telling how many innovations might be squashed under a system like that.

No doubt, the cybercriminals that Kaspersky has valiantly fought for more than a decade are only getting better at finding ways to exploit weaknesses in internet technologies increasingly at the heart of the way we shop, socialize and work. But to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, those who sacrifice net liberty for incremental increases in security no doubt will get neither. ®

via theregister.co.uk

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Creator of web feels 'sorry' for slashes in website URLs

Murali Kumar — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:25:51 -0700

Tim Berners-Lee started the web to help scientists communicate

The forward slashes at the beginning of internet addresses have long annoyed net users and now the man behind them has apologised for using them.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has confessed that the // in a web address were actually "unnecessary".
He told the Times newspaper that he could easily have designed URLs not to have the forward slashes.
"There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time," he said.
He admitted that when he devised the web, almost 20 years ago, he had no idea that the forward slashes in every web address would cause "so much hassle".
His light-hearted apology even had a green angle as he accepted that having to add // to every address had wasted time, printing and paper.
Sir Tim is currently director of the World Wide Web Consortium and he is also working with the UK government to help open up access to government data.

via news.bbc.co.uk

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Google Wave Cinema: Pulp Fiction

Murali Kumar — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:33:48 -0700

via youtube.com

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Understanding Google wave in 2minutes

Murali Kumar — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:09:38 -0700

via youtube.com

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Do it while you're young - Says Jackie Chan

Murali Kumar — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:51:29 -0700

via youtube.com

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Honey, I Shrunk The Flash Player

Murali Kumar — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:07:08 -0700

There are two Adobes. One is the company that produces the design tools that give our image-saturated world its glossy look and feel. It’s the Adobe of Photoshop and InDesign, of Premiere and LightRoom. It’s really very like Apple, with its gleaming San Jose tower blocks and deep code of secrecy.
Then there’s the other Adobe, the Adobe that used to be Macromedia. It’s kind of grubby, like the engineer deep in the bowels of the shiny modern yacht. It’s where JavaScript is being turned into a tool that can run clouds, and where Flash isn’t about the skip intro any more – it’s much more the White House’s AIR-based employee directory than animated adverts.
That was the Adobe that was on show in Los Angeles last week, the Adobe that delights in talking about directions in ColdFusion’s nested transaction model or in pioneering delivering enterprise application frameworks on Amazon’s EC2.
We all know the big news from MAX now. Not the cross-compiler that will deliver Flash applications to the iPhone (though that was pretty cool, and a shot in the arm for the LLVM open source compiler project that powers Adobe’s Flash translation engines). The really important announcement was the change in how the Flash player is being developed.
In the past Flash was a desktop tool first and foremost. That’s why the mobile version, Flash Lite, always lagged behind, as it was desktop Flash with bits removed. Taking things out of a complex run time engine is never easy, and certainly never quick, so while desktop Flash marched on to Flash 10, the mobile version languished as a dialect of Flash 8 – more than two years behind, and a drag for designers and developers who wanted to bring the modern web to the mobile phone.
With Flash 10.1 coming for (almost) all smartphones as well as desktops and netbooks, there had to be a big change. As Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch describes it, “We had a separate mobile client engineering team and a personal computer engineering team. So we put those together a year and a half ago now, and we now have an integrated team, all on one floor in the Bay Area”.
That means there’s one integrated code base with a mobile-first development model, which has led to some interesting side effects – much of what has been developed for mobile is now coming for free on PCs, like multitouch support and improved memory management. The core code is optimised for performance, with other smaller teams then porting it to specific platforms.
There will always be issues – as devices often have specific APIs for their hardware. Even so, Adobe’s new found openness is helping here, through the Open Screen Project, where companies like Nokia and ARM are now enthusiastic co-developers. The result is a set of common interfaces for hardware like accelerometers and multi-touch sensors. With AIR for smartphones a year or so away (and a mobile version of the Flex framework due before then) there’ll soon be even more hardware support.
Adobe is working on delivering on its new multi-screen promise, and thinking hard about what goes on each screen, from mobile to desktop to TV. A strong core platform means that it’s easy to fit a Flash Player into the small amount of memory in a TV, as well as on a whole spectrum of devices. There’s a lot of optimisation still to be done in Flash 10.1, with CPU and memory being the main constraints.
You won’t see Flash on older ARM platforms like ARM 9 (which will still run Flash Lite) – instead it’ll be limited to more capable hardware like the ARM 11 and later.
--Simon

via community.zdnet.co.uk

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