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Why is Microsoft so complacent ?

Microsoft is rapidly loosing it’s market share to Firefox and Opera but it doesn’t seem to be worried at all.


Microsoft executives have confirmed that aren’t planning to ship any new or intermediate version of IE before Longhorn(2006) though they are busy building and testing a faster, more secure version internally. Though they will continue to release patches and service packs that would “extend” the functionality of IE.


So that means, the About Dialog of IE would continue to show Version 6.0.abcd.xyz… and no version 6.5 or 7.0 until 2006.


This must be definitely good news for Firefox which just registered over 10 million downloads, ran a very successful 2 page ad in the NYTimes and has picked up tons of loyal fans in such a short span.


Even AOL is busy working on a browser. And Opera, which just released a beta version 8.0, claims to be the fastest browser and is also very popular though the free version is ad-supported.


Firefox and Opera might have a long way to go before they can unseat Microsoft, but the Browser Wars II has definitely shaken the Microsoft dominance and browser companies have no other option but to improve their features and provide more robust and secure products.


Microsoft, please wake up - The Fox is setting the ground on Fire. !!


Via The Seattle Times

Free SMS service for people affected by Asian earthquake

ForgetMeNot Software Limited, the operator of the 2-way messaging service ChatBar, has today announced that any families, friends and others, seeking to contact people affected by the lethal earthquake on December 26, can send FREE short message service (SMS) messages to and from affected countries through www.chatbar.com.

Free SMS messages can be via ChatBar to or from the following countries: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Thailand. SMS messages sent to mobile phones of foreign nationals roaming in those countries will also be provided free by ChatBar, although separate charges may be applied by some carriers.

Paul Roberts, Director, ForgetMeNot Software, stated “We are all shocked and stunned by the devastation wrought by the earthquake. In an effort to help, we wanted to make the functionality of ChatBar available free to everyone who needs to communicate with loved ones at this difficult time. Experience has shown that SMS messages may get through to mobile phones even though voice networks may be overloaded”. Those people without a mobile phone but access to an internet connected PC can still send and receive SMS messages through the service.

Relevant parties should utilize the following links:

http://www.chatbar.com/en/CreateAccount.aspx?promo=seasia (for English)
http://www.chatbar.com/zh-CHS/CreateAccount.aspx?promo=seasia (for Simplified Chinese)
http://www.chatbar.com/zh-CHT/CreateAccount.aspx?promo=seasia (for Traditional Chinese)
http://www.chatbar.com/tl/CreateAccount.aspx?promo=seasia (for Tagalog) [Via]

blinkx 2.0 - Don't need to wait for Longhorn

Blinkx 2.0 is a significant update, with improved functions in many areas, as well as new features. Smart Folders in particular should prove incredibly useful as they keep your most important searches constantly up-to-date.

blinkx 2.0 analyzes the Web pages, documents, and e-mail messages you view and works busily in the background to locate items that are similar. Before you even think about searching, results are ready. To accomplish this, it indexes blogs, news feeds, Web pages, product listings, video feeds, and your local documents and e-mails.

In previews of the coming Longhorn version of Windows, Microsoft has introduced the concept of a Library - a folder-like construct that organizes files by content rather than by location and that automatically updates to include new matching content. Longhorn is still years off, and the initial release won’t even include the Windows Future Storage component, which powers the Library concept.

But don’t worry; the Smart Folders feature in blinkx 2.0 offers that functionality now. You can define a Smart Folder based on a keyword query, or you can turn an existing folder into a Smart Folder, asking blinkx to use its implicit searching power to find items that are related to the files already in the folder. blinkx updates the folder with shortcuts to local files, e-mail messages, or Web items that match - you can set it to download off-line content automatically. When new matching content appears, blinkx alerts you by changing the folder’s icon. You can configure each Smart Folder, specifying which of the content types should be included and spelling out how recent and how relevant items must be. [Via PC Magazine]

New York City Hair Transplant: NY Hair Restoration Surgeons

Celebrity Hair Trasplant surgery in New York City

Hair transplant surgery is a minor surgical procedure that involves moving healthy hair follicles from the back and sides of the head to areas that are bald or thinning due to male or female pattern hair loss. The hair transplant takes place by surgically transferring these genetically-resistant hair follicles in the form of follicular grafts into the balding areas.

The first hair transplant for male pattern baldness was performed by Dr. Norman Orentreich in 1952 in New York City. After hair transplant, proper hair transplant care is essential. The successful Brad Pitt hair transplant surgery was not cheap. A hair transplant procedure in Costa Rica will cost about $2000 while cost of hair transplant in New York City will be several times more.

Robert M. Bernstein, MD has been selected as one of New York Magazine’s “Best Doctors”. Dr. Bernstein is the only hair transplant surgeon to have received this honor. Robert M. Bernstein is Associate Clinical Professor of Dermatology at Columbia University in New York. The Bernstein Medical - Center for Hair Restoration is located at 125 East 63rd Street, New York, NY.

Dr. Robin Unger has a practice, in New York City, exclusively restricted to hair transplant surgery and she is board certified by the ABHRS and a member of the ISHRS. She is one of the only female surgeons who performs this surgery and she operates on both men and women with hair loss.

If you are experiencing female hair loss or male pattern baldness and need more information on hair restoration, hair replacement, hair trasnplants or FDA approved remedies, Hair Club 2001 Marcus Avenue Lake Success, NY 11042 can help you address the issue of balding and thinning hair.

Other popular hair transplant clinics in New york city are:

The New York Hair Loss Center Manhattan
Hair Transplant Surgery and Consultation
44 E. 67th St., Suite 1A
New York, NY 10021

New York Long Island:
Hair Transplant Surgery and Consultation
2 Lincoln Ave., Suite 302
Rockville Centre, NY 11570

Egosurfing: Searching the WWW for occurences of your name

egosurfing: Scanning the World-Wide Web, databases, print media or research papers looking for the mention of your name.


Do you ever search for your name in Google just to see how popular you are on the internet ? Well you are not along, USAToday reports that Some CEOs surf Web to see how they’re being portrayed.


Many corporate communications departments assign someone to do the CEO surfing because CEOs with delicate egos would prefer to stay insulated. But Slosberg is among an expanding group who swallow hard, then wade into the muck. The practice is not unique to CEOs and is so common among professionals, including politicians and journalists, that it has been coined “ego surfing.” The term has gone mainstream. It was the question to a recent Jeopardy answer and was the focus of a recent episode of Two and a Half Men on CBS.


Tracking ego surfing is difficult, but there are 25 million to 50 million Internet searches each day using proper names, according to Search Engine Watch. Ego surfing by CEOs — or CEgO surfing — is no doubt a tiny portion, but a weighty one. CEOs who do surf out of conceit are likely to be disappointed, because what they find is a mixture of half-truths, falsehoods and precious little they would want their mothers to see.


Ask Ford Motor CEO Bill Ford if he CEgO surfs, and he shakes his head. “It’s too depressing,” he says.


Well even I do some ego surfing just to see my blog rank on Google !!

Hair Loss Treatment, Hair Transplant, Hair Replacement, Hair Restoration weaving

Losing your hair? What causes hair loss ? Considering a hair transplant? What is the cost of hair transplant ? How will my photo look after the hair replacement surgery ? Is hair trasplant same as hair replacement. Where is the nearest Hair replacement clinic in my city. Who is the best hair transplant doctor or surgeon that performed on celebrities? What is the hair surgery procedure ? Will hair growth return to normal after a hair replacement operation ? All your hair fall related queries are answered here.

The permanent natural hair loss treatment is hair weaving and hair transplantation. Due to stress, hair loss in children and women is getting as common as male hair loss pattern. You get to hear of hair loss ointment creams, herbal hair oil, hair loss ayurvedic medicine shampoo but none of these alternative home treatment works to cure the hair fall problem.

One method of hiding hair loss used by bald woman is the comb over, which involves restyling the remaining hair to cover the balding area. It is usually a temporary solution, useful only while the area of hair loss is small. As the hair loss increases, a comb over becomes less effective. Another method is to wear a hairpiece - a wig or toupee.

The successful techniques to restore the hair line is hair transplant by medical hair restoration experts. Hair clinics for baldness treatment that have a lower and cheap hair transplant cost are in India Chennai, New Delhi, Mumbai, Pakistan Lahore and Islamabad. The Hair Replacement hospitals in Australia like Sydney, Melbourne, or China Hongkong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia do offer good alternatives but the hair surgery cost is higher.

Surgical hair restoration are the only permanent solutions to male and female hair loss by surgery. Hair loss is a natural daily occurrence, but most hair regrows because the hair follicle remains. When shedding significantly exceeds hair growth, baldness occurs. Female hair loss usually takes the form of thinning hair over the entire top, or crown, of the head.

Two drugs are available for the treatment of balding in men. Minoxidil, is available without a prescription in two strengths. Finasteride is a prescription drug taken orally once daily. Both agents are modestly effective in maintaining (and sometimes regrowing) hair that is lost as a result of androgenic alopecia. Rogaine, the only FDA approved topical treatment for male or female pattern hair loss. Although Rogaine is not effective in stimulating new hair growth in many males, it appears to be more effective in retarding hair loss in a substantial amount of both male and females.(Available in the U.S. only through prescription).

Hair Transplant time involving hair weaving operation varies from 2-4 hours. With advanced micro-surgical techniques, most hair transplant patients do not need a bandage. The transplanted hair will grow forever and requires no special maintenance of any kind. Hair Weaving doctors generally shoot before and after videos of bald patients and provide DVD and CD’s containing instructions for hair care and hair weaving.

During hair transplants, a small section of hair tissue is removed from the donor area (area containing healthy hair follicles on the back and sides of the head which are genetically programmed not to shed) and is then dissected into individual hair follicular units and micro-grafts. Compared to many other cosmetic surgery procedures, hair transplants are a comfortable treatment for the patient. More follicular units and micro-grafts are placed behind the hairline, providing density and volume to cover the larger balding areas.

The hair weaving cost the price can range from $750.00 to $2,500.00 for a quality custom-made hair addition. Before considering a hair transplant surgery, many men and women do not qualify for hair transplantation because of unrealistic expectations given their amount of available donor hair. In general, hair replacement candidates must have healthy hair growth at the back and sides of the head to serve as donor areas.

Interesting Hair Loss facts: Rockefeller had an extreme case of alopecia that caused him to lose all of the hair on his face, including his eyebrows and eyelashes. There is no proven relationships between androgenic baldness, dandruff, metabolism, diabetes and heart disease. In Body hair transplantation, Hair from elsewhere on the body may be harvested and transplanted to the scalp, or other location on the body.

Add a TextArea for posting comments in your Blogger site

I know it is sometimes a pain to post new comments in Blogger sites. First the site visitor has to click the “Post a comment” site, then it takes him to another page where either he signs-in if he has a blogger account or post anonymously. This is so much to do and I feel that the visitor exits the site without leaving a footprint.


Because of all these hassles, I decided to put a text area in my posts where users can post comments directly without needing to sign-in. This is already present in Typepad or Movable Type Blogs.


After some tweaking of the Blogger template, I now have a textbox in all my posts. Ofcoure, I still have the normal link “Post a Comment” for those who don’t wan’t to post anonymously.


Just add the following piece of code to your Blogger Template code, save the template and republish your blog.





Click on the above image to expand. If things go fine, you will see a textarea for comment in each of you blog posts.


Remember to replace [BlogID] with your own blog number


For those looking at a more lengthy solution with all fields like Name, Email, URL, see this post.

After Blogger and Picasa, will Google buy Flickr ?

Is Google slowly moving towards having a monopoly on the web ?



There are rumours on the net that Google might now be eyeing Flickr which is a very popular photo sharing service among bloggers.


And there are reasons to believe this rumour. Google has already purchased Blogger from Pyralabs and Picasa - So they already have a blog application, a photo-sharing tool, now all they need is a photo storage server. Plus, Flickr offers other advantages to Google like Flicks supports an Open API, uses AdWords, uses tags, and has a strong focus on community: groups, live chats, etc. and it will certainly boost the size of Google Image database which was updated recently.


Though I use Blogger for my Blog, I am disappointed with the speed of Blogger sites, and there is almost nothing new in terms of features. Why do they stop innovating once a big fish eats the small fish ? Hope the same doesn’t happen with Flicks incase Google acquires it.


Some say that it isn’t possible as Google already has Picasa which also offers server space but to me, Flickr has a very big advantage, it already works with Blogger, you just send a picture as an attachment in email to a Flickr address and the image will appear in your blog immediately with all the right titles and descriptions. So Google might use Picasa as a desktop application for browing and editing photos offline while it may use Flickr as a server app.


Read what other blogs think about this rumour:

On Google Buying Flickr

Next Google acquisition: Flickr + Picasa 2.0 = Fotoogle


Google in 2005: The next Google acquisition might be some online printing service.

Join now and receive a free I.B.M. laptop

The e-mail messages are tantalizing: "Your complimentary iPod with free shipping is waiting."


The lesson is that the only thing on this earth that is truly free is your mother’s love. Everything else has a string or catch attached.


Gratis Internet, a Web marketer based in Washington, has developed a system in which it buys pricey products like iPods - www.freeipods.com - and gives them away. To receive the iPod, participants are asked to

sign up for one of about 10 different offers and to persuade five others to do the same. They have developed similar programs giving out

$700 desktop computers (freedesktoppc.com), $800 flat-screen televisions (freeflatscreens.com) and high-end designer handbags (freehandbags.com). The main difference between the offers is how many others must be signed up for the main participant to receive the “free” merchandise. Its customers include Time Warner’s AOL; BMG Music Service, a CD club owned by Bertelsmann; and USA Today, which is owned by the Gannett Company.


Susan Grant, director of the National Fraud Information Center, a project of the National Consumers League, said “free” offers on the Internet should be examined closely for underlying costs. Typically, a business will need to cover the amount of the prize and such offers will be followed by an onslaught of solicitations. “I don’t think a lot of people would really stop to think about the implications,” she said. Random spam filled the in-box he relies on for orders, and legitimate e-mail messages got lost, he said. The situation worsened when he tried to use the “unsubscribe” option on a spam note. He said his computer locked up, and after it was restarted, files began opening 50 to 60 times in row and the computer ran at a crawl.


Via The New York Times: A Web Offer Too Good to Be True? Read the Fine Print

Favourite Firefox extensions for 2005

Firefox extensions allow you to add a host of features to Mozilla’s hot new browser. DesktopPipeline has choosem some of the best for you. Mozilla’s Firefox browser has spread through the Web-browsing community like, well, wildfire. While its current immunity to the malware afflicting Microsoft Internet Explorer may have sparked its popularity, one of the things that will keep Firefox in public favor is its use of extensions. These add-ons allow users to either keep browser lean and mean, or include a variety of utilitarian, interesting, or just plain fun features.


Mozilla has made it very simple for Firefox enthusiasts to install and uninstall extensions via its Firefox Extensions tool. By clicking on Tools/Extensions, a window comes up that offers a list of the installed add-ons and the ability to uninstall an extension, check for updates, access any options for the applet, or look for more.


McSearchPreview - Add thumbnail images to search results

Gnusto - Runs text-adventure games

Nuke Anything - Temporarily removes ads

FoxyTunes - Integrates media player controls into the browser


Via

Windows XP Service Pack 3 (XP SP3) will be a regular customer fix

Neowin reports that Windows guru Paul Thurrott has thrown up an amazing interview on his site, dealing with the creation of Windows XP SP2. Thurrott sat down with several of the project leads of SP2, and ended up painting a great picture of how this important security-focused update came to life.


SP3 for Windows XP is slated to be a service pack the way we’ve always done service packs, and not to be a major upgrade. It will focus specifically on QFEs and fixes [to bugs] that are reported by customers. It should not contain new features. And customers have been yelling at us for the past few years about that.


Read the complete interview over on Paul’s SuperSite for Windows - Windows XP Service Pack 2: The Inside Story

India International School - English School in Japan

An explosion in the number of Indian workers here has prompted a long-term Indian resident of Tokyo to open a school that offers her compatriots’ children an opportunity to learn about their cultural heritage.

The India International School in Japan, which opened in Tokyo’s Koto Ward in August, is the first of its kind. It has 35 pupils — 23 kindergartners and 12 elementary school students, including one Japanese and two Pakistani children. Located in the bustling capital city of Tokyo, India International School in Japan (IISJ) is a private, co-educational elementary school.

After careful evaluation of the curricula, IISJ has decided to opt for CBSE and ICSE curriculum as the most appropriate curriculum for their school. Students relocating from (and eventually back to) India will not be disrupting their coursework. In fact, it will only be complemented by their unique opportunity to live and share in a thriving, cosmopolitan city.

"The main reason (for opening the school) is that (more and more Indian) information technology families are coming to Japan. These families are with young children, but they don’t have schools for themselves," said school President Nirmal Jain, who has lived in Japan for 30 years.

The school, founded with financial support from Indian residents here as well as some Japanese supporters, is chiefly designed to satisfy the needs of Indian residents, said Jain, who has also worked as a radio announcer at Japan Broadcasting Corp., better known as NHK.

Meera Gadgil, whose husband runs a computer software firm here, cited cheaper tuition fees as one of the attractions of Jain’s school, which her three-year-old son attends.

Monthly tuition at the India school costs 50,000 yen, roughly half of what is charged by an international school on average.

The school offers a program modeled on the Indian government-set primary school education curriculum, supplying the same textbooks and teaching the Hindi language.

Classes are taught in English, another official language in India, by mostly Indian women who have teaching experience at home, Jain said.

Address:
India International School In Japan (IISJ)
C/O Kudan Bhavan,
1-15-14, Kudankita, Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo-JAPAN
102-0073
India International School in Japan Official Website

Finally, someone has the courage to challenge Firefox

Microsoft employee Peter Torr has started a flame war in his own blog today. Torr claims that the distribution and code signing of Firefox isn’t up to scratch. Torr provides screenshots of the latest XPSP2 protection IE but fails to mention the poor protection in IE 6 SP1 which many more users are still using. Nevertheless if you enjoy battling it out about Firefox vs IE then this is a read for you. Here’s a snip:


Recently, a lot of volunteers donated money to the Firefox project to pay for a two-page advert in the New York Times. If only they had spent some of that money on improving the security of their users by, say, purchasing a VeriSign code signing certificate.


"But the thing that makes me really not trust the browser is that it doesn’t matter how secure the original code is if the typical usage pattern of the browser requires users to perform insecure actions.


· Installing Firefox requires downloading an unsigned binary from a random web server

· Installing unsigned extensions is the default action in the Extensions dialog

· There is no way to check the signature on downloaded program files

· There is no obvious way to turn off plug-ins once they are installed

· There is an easy way to bypass the “This might be a virus” dialog


Via How can I trust Firefox?

Via Neowin

How to use Google Scholar ?

The Georgia State University Library has a nice page to teach you how to use Google Scholar here.


You can use it to search for scholarly materials (journal articles, books, theses, preprints, etc.) from “a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.” Doing a few random searches, I found content from PubMed and PubMed Central, Astrophysics Data System, ACM, IEEE, Springer, Wiley, Elsevier, American Physical Society, American Institute of Physics as well as Science, Nature, Genetics, Plant Physiology, Clinical Chemistry, and Journal of Biological Chemistry. For books, you can connect to OCLC’s Open WorldCat to see if libraries in your area (including GSU) own them.


As a searching tool, Google Scholar is still extremely basic. You cannot limit searches by date, language or format (to journal articles only, for example). You cannot build complex searches or combine previous searches. The search results, ranked by “relevancy,” cannot be re-sorted by date. There is no automatic mapping between synonyms; compare the results for “heart attack” with “myocardial infarction.” There is also no “related records” search option except for looking at articles that cite your results, which is not very precise.

Google offers some Modern advice for parents-to-be

Ten years ago, when you named a new child, you just needed to make sure the moniker was easy to spell and didn’t rhyme with ‘smelly’ or any other schoolyard taunt. But now, you’ve got to consider the search engine effect: is the name easily located via a Google search, or will your kid be confused with a multitude of John Smiths?


The solution? A unique name for which the only possible search results would be related to your child. But not actually “unique,” since Social Security records tell us that 239 girls named Unique were born in 2002 (scroll down to “popularity of a name”). Imagine a baby boy named “Angus Katzenjammer.” He’d have a wide open field since that search currently doesn’t return any results. Or perhaps a young lass is named “Humid Lipstocking.” With the exception of Google helpfully asking “did you mean Humid Lipsticking,” it would be perfect.


In reality, you don’t need to be famous or have a weird name to increase the odds of appearing in Google’s search results. Just start a blog or build a website and you should eventually find yourself in our index. In an interesting twist on self promotion, some people have even bought AdWords ads which would result in the display of small text ads next to search results for their name. Yes - it is truly a brave new world.


Via Google Blog

Avoid the surprise of seeing your artwork elsewhere on the web

The Web makes it easy to let others see your images. It also makes it easy for others to steal your images or use them without permission. That’s why smart photographers add digital watermarks to their images. Ben Long looks at the options.


As anyone who’s ever illegally downloaded an MP3 file already knows, stealing a digital asset is really easy. With Web-based digital images it’s even easier. Whether your work is delivered on-line or via physical prints, it’s worth taking a few extra steps to help protect your rights as a creator.


Placing a visible watermark is a great way of establishing your ownership of an image while simultaneously deterring theft. After all, an image is far less useful if it’s got a big “Copyright” logo burned into it. The downside to this approach, of course, is that your lovely compositions will be marred by a graphic and, depending on where you position the watermark, there’s no reason an image thief can’t just crop it out.


None of these technologies can prevent a user from downloading and saving your images, of course, but most people want to use images legally. If they see that the image has obviously been copyrighted, they’re more likely to look elsewhere for imagery. What’s more, these techniques help quickly establish your ownership of an image, making it easier to discourage a thief — either a deliberate or inadvertent thief — from using your pictures.


creativepro.com - Framed and Exposed: Rightly Writing Copyright

Buy India Pictures from the Hindu Newspaper

Buy pictures from the Hindu Newspaper

The Hindu Newspaper group has launched an online library of over 40,000 images related to India similar to the Corbis stock photography and digital pictures service.

The site is divided into several broad categories: creative, news, sports, and historic. (It’s also searchable by keyword.) I took a look at the Historic section, which stated that its photographs come from 125 years of archives. It’s searchable by keyword and year span; I searched for history and got three results.

The results are listed in thumbnails that are almost smaller than the list of options that follow them (Add to Cart, Add to Wishlist, Calculate Price, Show Details) but when you click on the image you get a much larger picture and many details, including an extensive caption, category and sub-category, date, and location. There’s also a link to calculate price based on what you want to do with the image, from personal use to editorial use and more (decor?)

The Hindu Images is a web-based online catalogue cum storefront for The Hindu’s rights managed photo stock. Pictures can be downloaded from the Web site by making payments through credit cards. Prices of pictures start from Rs 500.

thehinduimages.com

Google Library Project - The fineprint

As has been reported quite widely, Google has begun a massive digitization project with five libraries:

• Stanford University (all 8M)


• University of Michigan (all 7M)


• Harvard University (pilot of 40,000 out of 15M)


• New York Public Library (pilot; expand to 20M)


• Oxford’s Bodleian Library (1M public domain)

The total covered by existing agreements is said to be 15 million. Each is estimated to cost $10 to scan. Stanford’s scanning unit is said to be able to do 100,000 pages a day. Oxford’s scanning unit is said to be able to do 10,000 books per week. If all of them are that speed then by my math it will take a little over five years to scan them all. Similarly, the University of Michigan says the project will take six years.

Most agreements indicate that the hosting library will get a digital copy of their books, which apparently they will then host for their users. In addition, Google will throw all the books into its Google Print service.

Some books are already available through the service. For example, Books and Culture is an out-of-copyright book from 1896. Note that unlike a publisher-submitted book, you can easily link to or view any page: the cover, the University of Michigan bookplate, page 50, the U of M checkout slip, the back cover. You can also search the full text leading to a standard Google results page with links and snippets. Click on any of the links and the resulting page will highlight your search terms, just like Google Catalog.

Sadly, it seems the only thing not available is the full text of the books. However, it is pretty easy to get the underlying images of the pages (tho not as easy as simply looking at the page, alas) so one could certainly OCR it themselves if they liked, although it’d likely not be as good as Google’s work. Things look much worse for in-copyright books. For example, The Role of GATT in Relation to Trade and Development was only published in 1964 and is apparently in-copyright. One can thus only get back practically useless snippets while the fat-cats at Google have the whole thing.

Fortunately, “Google is negotiating with various publishers to facilitate arrangements to make works more easily accessible while providing appropriate protections for copyright holders” for in-copyright library books. It will be interesting to see how much success they have. It’s not clear how to search Google for just library books, or even just books, or to find out how many they have, but here are the handful I know about, all from U. of M. (books published after 1923 are copyrighted):

• Darwin, and After Darwin (1906)


• True Stories of Pioneer Life (1924)


• Record of Service of Michigan Volunteers in the Civil War, 1861-1865 (C)


• The Return of the Middle Class (1922)


• The Role of GATT in Relation to Trade and Development (1964)


• Books and Culture (1896)


• A New View of Society & Other Writings (1927)

Do you hold the copyright on a book? Does your book have an ISBN? If you answered yes to both these questions, you don’t have to wait for all this. You can simply sign up to Google Print, send Google a copy of your book, and they’ll scan it in and OCR it for you for free! Then they’ll send you checks with all the money your book makes through ads! So please do it! Please?

A closing thought. Much of the discussion around this endeavor has focused on its effect for the largely-affluent and privileged children who go to the major universities from which the books are taken. Will they stop going to the library? Will they miss the smell of dead trees? Will they be able to do research more efficiently? With all due respect, this is the wrong group to think about. The real beneficiaries of this scanning should be the less fortunate people around the world who barely have access to a library, let alone a world-class one. Let us scan these books for them.

By Aaron Swartz (me@aaronsw.com) of Google Weblog

Do you want to be Time's Person Of The Year

If I were in the Time Magazine’s jury, I would definitely vote Firefox developer team as TIME person of the year. They gave us such a neat piece of software.

If that would have happened (in my wildest dreams), the cover of the magazine would have looked something like this:



If you’d like to create your own fake Person of the Year magazine cover, J-Walk has a nice and easy way out - just download this Photoshop file, add a photo, and voila! Instant fame.

You will, of course, need a copy of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements in order to work with this file.

What can a Windows user do with live Linux CDs

With Knoppix, Linux is no longer just for Linux users.


Live Linux CDs are a simple concept with many possible uses. Here are 5 things which a Windows user can do with a live Linux CD.


1. Try Linux without installing it - Knoppix is the “mother” of all live Linux CD’s. It comes with 2 GBs of software making it the perfect distribution to try Linux with.


2. Maintain hard drive/recover data - SystemRescue CD includes a host of tools for maintaining a hard drive including a partition manager and resizing software and drive imaging software. SystemRescue CD can read a variety of file systems including Windows NTFS.


3. Reset forgotten Windows passwords - Austrumi is a good little live CD distribution that includes a tool at boot that allows you to reset forgotten Windows passwords (including Administrator).


4. Watch/listen to multimedia - Movix is a live distribution designed just for playing audio and video files from the internet, CD and DVD.


5. Scan safely for virus’s - INSERT is the INside SEcurity Rescue Toolkit and includes an anti-virus package making it a great way to clean an infected computer.


Via (:^tuxs.org) 10 things to do with a live linux cd


David Brickner adds


One useful hack tells the reader how to scan their Windows machine for viruses offline (well, from Linux running from CD actually), without fear of infecting the machine further, infecting other machines on the network, or sending keystrokes (and passwords) to someone else. If you’ve ever been frustrated by the need to connect an infected machine to the network to download virus definitions and had that machines infect others while you were doing this, you know why this hack is important.


A related hack tells you how to download patches from Microsoft’s website and put them on the Windows partition so you can apply them from within Windows when you aren’t connected on the network. This is useful because a freshly installed Windows XP machine on an unprotected network, like that which exists in most users homes, can be infected in just a few minutes. If you downloaded these patches while running the unprotected machine you could possibly get infected before the first service pack had downloaded.


Another hack allows you to restore corrupted system files. Using this hack I was able to instruct someone on how to replace a deleted explorer.exe on a Windows Me installation which was preventing Windows from booting.


One of the most useful hacks covers the ability to boot Knoppix and access a Windows hard drive to backup or retrieve important data. This is useful when you can’t boot into Windows because a virus, malware, or user mistake has rendered Windows inaccessible. Windows users sometimes find themselves having to resort to the OEMs restore CDs, and by using Knoppix they can safely backup their data before they blow everything away.


With the Resize Windows Partitions hack there is no need to purchase a third party tool like Partition Magic if you need to reconfigure your hard drive partitions. Likewise, the Clone Hard Drives hack in Chapter 5 makes it easy for users to backup an entire hard drive, or migrate to a new larger one without the use of third party software that needs to be paid for.


Many of the other hacks in the book also apply to Windows and Linux users alike. And since the book starts off with several easy hacks on using the Linux desktop, it is even a mini-tutorial on capabilities of Linux as a desktop system. Which means it is a good tool for Linux evangelism to your open source deprived friends.

NYTimes : Firefox is a classic overnight success, many years in the making.

The Fox Is in Microsoft’s Henhouse (and Salivating)


With Firefox, open-source software moves from back-office obscurity to your home, and to your parents’, too. (Your children in college are already using it.) It is polished, as easy to use as Internet Explorer and, most compelling, much better defended against viruses, worms and snoops.


Microsoft has always viewed Internet Explorer’s tight integration with Windows to be an attractive feature. That, however, was before security became the unmet need of the day. Firefox sits lightly on top of Windows, in a separation from the underlying operating system that the Mozilla Foundation’s president, Mitchell Baker, calls a “natural defense.”


For the first time, Internet Explorer has been losing market share. According to a worldwide survey conducted in late November by OneStat.com, a company in Amsterdam that analyzes the Web, Internet Explorer’s share dropped to less than 89 percent, 5 percentage points less than in May. Firefox now has almost 5 percent of the market, and it is growing.


Gary Schare, Microsoft’s director of product management for Windows, has been assigned the unenviable task of explaining how Microsoft plans to respond to the Firefox challenge with a product whose features were last updated three years ago. He has said that current users of Internet Explorer will stick with it once they take into account “all the factors that led them to choose I.E. in the first place.” Beg your pardon. Choose? Doesn’t I.E. come bundled with Windows?


And a telling reality from Gary Schare, Microsoft’s director of product management for Windows:


Mr. Schare may be the official spokesman, but he does not use Internet Explorer himself. Instead he uses Maxthon, published by a little company of the same name. It uses the Internet Explorer engine but provides loads of features that Internet Explorer does not. “Tabs are what hooked me,” he told me, referring to the ability to open within a single window many different Web sites and move easily among them, rather than open separate windows for each one and tax the computer’s memory. Firefox has tabs. Other browsers do, too. But fundamental design decisions for Internet Explorer prevent the addition of this and other desiderata without a thorough update of Windows, which will not be complete until 2006 at the earliest.


Today, it’s the Internet Explorer code that is long overdue for a top-to-bottom redesign, one that would treat security as integral, and Firefox is the challenger with new, clean code. Netscape bequeathed its software to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which used an open-source approach to undertake a complete rewrite that took three years. Firefox is built upon the Mozilla base.


All Microsoft can offer Internet Explorer users are incremental security improvements, new patches to fix holes in the old patches. In Windows XP Service Pack 2, the company claimed as a major security advance a notice that is displayed if the user takes an action within Internet Explorer that sets off a download of a tiny application called an ActiveX control, which can take control of your PC and, in a worst-case instance, erase your hard drive. “Users still must make informed decisions,” Mr. Schare added. (With Firefox, users do not have to make decisions about these miniprograms, which are blocked by design.)


Via The New York Times

MMS Video Scandals in India Not Limited to Bollywood Celebrities

Sometime back, a student posted video clips of the infamous DPS MMS scandal on the Bazee website (now part of ebay India) and that led to the arrest of the CEO because of flaws in Indian cyber laws.

But that was just a tip of the iceberg. With prices of computer webcams and camera phones equipped with video cameras coming down, YouTube and other video sharing sites were flooded with MMS videos that are often shot with hidden cameras and often without permission.

And since these clips fall under the category of “user generated content”, there’s little one can do to get such content removed from the Internet. Also, the mobile service provider, web-hosting company, ISPs, search engines and cyber cafes cannot be held liable for serving these videos.

But MMS videos are not all about voyeurism. For instance, filmmaker Nandy used MMS clips in a creative way to promote one of his Hindi films on mobile phones.

The other angle is money (or advertising dollars). You may have come across mms clips of some Indian actresses like Mallika Sherawat, Katrina Kaif, Preity Zinta, Riya Sen, etc. on YouTube - they aren’t real but here’s how the content creators make money from these these videos:

They morph these photos of Indian girls with nude videos of Hollywood actresses and post a portion of them onto YouTube. The YouTube video has links to the site (like rapidshare) where people can download the full clip. When people visit these download sites, they are served ads and that’s how pranksters are able to monetize fake video clips.

Watch Indian Bollywood Movies Online Free

How to watch Latest Indian Movies over the Internet for free ? Or how to download hindi movies ?

That’s probably the most sought after query on web - most people want to either watch hindi movies online or download the movies for offline viewing without spending money.

Indian Bollywood Hindi films are popular in for their music, songs, and extravagent colorful potrayl of Indian Weddings but unfortunately most of the bollywood videos online are either copyright violations or have been posted without prior permission from the producers.

While you can legally buy entire bollywood film DVDs from Indiatimes, rediff, ebay or even subscribe and watch the Hindi, Tamil, Kannada Movies, Malayalam or Telegu Movies, Pakistan Plays or films online as streaming media by paying for it, sites like Youtube and Metacafe have just taken the business out of them.

For example, a simple search for “bollywood movies” or “hindi movies” will returns tons of video clips on Youtube which have either been scrapped from the movie VCD’s or recorded with camcorders during pre-release sessions.

While youtube requires you to register before you can view adult movie scenes, Metacafe has no such restriction and is turning out to be a popular destinations for Indian located across the world.

It is also possible to download movies and video clips from Youtube or any other video site since they are essentially flv files which can be played with any free FLV player. You can even download them as AVI and play with Windows Media player.

However, downloading hindi movies is not for dial-up users as the music video files are huge. Some downloadable hindi movies in xdiv formats on some torrent websites are of excellent quaility like a original hindi DVD.

Youtube and even Google video also has a large collection of old hindi movies and songs plus movie trailors of the latest bollywood flicks. But again, you may be breaking certain copyright laws by download them to your computer.

If TIME Magazine chooses Bloggers as People of the Year

Person of the Year is an annual issue of TIME magazine that features a profile on the man, woman, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that “for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year.




Micro Persuasion and HypergeneMedia Blogs have some innovative cover ideas for TIME magazine.


The bloggers absolutely deserve to be this year’s People of the Year. If you agree, then make your voice heard. Send an email to the editors of TIME and explain why the bloggers deserve to be this year’s choice.

Do you really need MS Desktop Search ?

Just when Google released the Desktop Search, Microsoft also launched the much hyped MSN Toolbar Suite Beta which promises to find files, photos, and music, the interface is fancy and cool.


I am sure this has convinced you enough to download this suite and try it yourself. But just wait before hitting the download button. Why do you need MS Desktop Search when your computer already has MS Desktop Search installed - Microsoft just didn’t tell you until now how to use it. It’s called Windows Indexing Service, and it’s a standard feature of Windows 2000 and Windows XP. You can use Indexing Service to index documents and document properties on your disks and store the information in a catalog. You can also use Indexing Service to search for documents, either through Search on the Start menu or through a Web browser.


To actually use Indexing Services as it was originally intended, you need to utter a few magic words, which Microsoft has chosen to keep secret from the common user.


First, turn on Indexing Service, and leave it alone for a few hours so it can index all your drives. Then open the Windows file search box as you would normally.- for example, by choosing it on the Start menu.


Here’s where the magic starts. First of all, type only in the space labelled ‘A word or phrase in the file’ (or in Windows 2000, ‘Containing Text’).


Now, to find a word inside a file, simply preface it with ‘!’. And, to find a filename, preface it with ‘@filename’.


So typing ‘!vacation’ and hitting ‘enter’ will instantly find files containing the word ‘vacation’. And ‘@filename vacation’ will instantly display all filenames containing the complete word vacation. You can add a ‘*’ to the end to find other words like ‘vacationing’.


It appears that the new MSN search simply provides a more user friendly front end to this existing service, and makes a few more file types searchable. If Google hadn’t come along to give Microsoft a good kick up the BIOS, Windows’ secret desktop search function would have remained in obscurity for many years to come.


So Microsoft is just trying to market a tool that is already on your computer. Microsoft is just a marketing company that also sells software


Via Microsoft reinvents its own wheel

Download freeware and shareware from The Register

The Register have just announced the launch of their new download site. The download site is offering Windows and Macintosh software. Next to that, they also announced their software shop, which offers software in boxes. I’m pretty much convinced this will be one of the major download sites in no time.


The content is provided by 5 Star Network, which is, just as The Register, based in the UK, and also provides the content for the LockerGnome downloads.


We’re absolutely delighted in the run-up to the Festive Season™ to be able to offer our readers a little something from the Vulture Central “get-something-for-free-pay-nothing-ever” department.


Indeed, we’re sure that fans of El Reg will find this a refreshing change from the inexorable “buy-now-pay-2020-at-86%-APR” Yule orgy of capitalism which has so sullied the spirit of Christmas.


What has surprised me the most is that a search for “Desktop Search Tools” in the Register Download site did not return even a single desktop search product like X1, Copernic, etc. though the page said Found 902 titles for “desktop search tools” in Windows. (0.32 seconds)


So that needs a bit of tweaking I guess.


Via Shareware Blogs

Five great reasons to switch to OpenOffice

Jem Berkes offers some very good reasons to use OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office, and the best reasons have nothing to do with cost of the software.

After all: software companies die, but information lasts forever. If a company takes the secrets of unlocking your data to its grave, where will that leave you?

*OpenOffice.org runs on multiple platforms. Currently: Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Mac OS X.

*OpenOffice.org is stable, and runs smoothly.

*Microsoft has made it clear that it wants proprietary document formats, and inconsistent ones at that. This may work as long as Microsoft is around and developing software that supports files created by outdated products.

*OpenOffice.org uses data formats designed to be easily interchanged (OASIS specification), and other projects are cooperating with the vision of open document interchange - e.g. Abiword, and KOffice.

An 82-year-old Nobel laureate will marry 28-year-old graduate student

Chen Ning Yang is a prolific author, his numerous articles appearing in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, The Physical Review, Reviews of Modern Physics, and the Chinese Journal of Physics.


In 1950 Yang married Chih Li Tu and is now the father of three children: Franklin, born 1951; Gilbert, born 1958; and Eulee, born 1961. The 82-year-old Nobel laureate Chen Ning Yang will marry a 28-year old graduate student.


I just found this news very interesting so I decided to share it.

Via Notes Above the Underground

Forget Reliance Mobile Support *333

I know calling *333 on your Reliance India Mobile and then waiting for a operator to get free so that she can answer your simple queries - this whole exercise is such a pain. Then Reliance IndiaMobile Discussion Forums are there for your rescue.

RIM Services - Discussions related to Reliance Indiamobile services. (RIM Postpaid, RIM Prepaid, Miscellaneous, FWP/FWT, FLP)
R World - Discussions related to the much hyped ‘R World’ service of Reliance IndiaMobile
R Connect - Discussions related to the ‘R Connect’ service of Reliance IndiaMobile

P.S. I am not sure if these forums are supported by Reliance Infocomm but the users are very quick to answer your queries. The owner of the website just confirmed that the website is not associated with Reliance Infocomm.

Reliance IndiaMobile Discussion Forums

Preview the Firefox Ad that will run in NYTimes tomorrow

The Firefox Advertisement for New York Times is complete and would be published tomorrow.

The Mozilla Foundation has announced that the long-awaited New York Times advertisement for Mozilla Firefox will run in tomorrow’s edition (Thursday 16th December 2004). The two-page black and white ad (small image of the ad, large image of the ad) features the names of the 10,000 donors on the left with a large
Firefox logo graphic and quotes from satisfied users on the right. A PDF of the finished ad is available but be warned: it’s a large and complex document.

Spread Firefox ealier announced that at the conclusion of their New York Times advertisement donation drive they have raised $250,000, with roughly 10,000 names to be placed in the ad. The team expects to use roughly $50,000 on the actual ad itself, and the remainder will go towards the Mozilla Foundation, and Firefox 1.0 launch activities. More info is available in the FAQ.

Update: Red Herring has an interview with Rob Davis, the mastermind behind the NYT ad campaign.

A preview of the Firefox ad
Firefox Ad In PDF

Some really bad news for Google

At the time, when Google Desktop Search is already competing with big players like Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves, Gartner has just made the going even tougher.

Don’t use Google desktop search in your business, warns Gartner. Google Desktop Search has great potential for business use. Its security problems and lack of corporate-ready functions, however, make it unsuitable for widespread use right now.

Gartner has warned that companies shouldn’t use the new Google Desktop Search tool because of security concerns and a lack of features. In a three-page research document, the authors - Whit Andrews, Maurene Grey and David Smith - say the tool that was released in beta in October is “not the proper search tool for businesses right now”.

Instead they reiterate concerns put forward by the CEO of Google rival Copernic, David Burns, two months ago: “Google’s ‘Consent to Collect Nonpersonal Information’ states that GDS collects non-personal data; however, the policy is a one-sided contract in that the user must trust that Google will make the right decisions as to what it will collect.”

However, it also doesn’t offer enough features and for it to recommend Google it would want to see “greater customisation of interface, flexibility for visualisation of results, groupwide administration and index load-balancing”.

This is certainly not good news for Google at a time when its biggest competitor MSN desktop search is getting better reviews. Preston Gralla of Oreilly writes:

Google may be the ultimate Web searcher, but when it comes to finding things on your computer, the just-released beta of MSN Desktop Search beats it hands-down.

That’s because Microsoft’s search tool has been built specifically to search through emails and documents, and so it lets you fine-tune your search in ways that Google doesn’t. So if you’re looking for a specific piece of email, for example, you can search by folder, by sender, by date, by size of file attachments, and more - and you can combine them all for exceedingly fine-tuned searches.

Additionally, MSN Desktop Search has an interface that lets you easily sort and resort your results, and lets you right-click on any result, and then take actions on the file from a pop-up menu - the same pop-up menu that appears when you right-click in Windows Explorer.

There are a lot of other nifty extras in it as well. It can sit as a box in your Taskbar for example, and when you want to do a search, type your search into the box, and results pop up, menu-style. Click on any result to get straight to the file or email.

Google’s search tool, on the other hand, uses the Web search paradigm. You can fine-tune it in ways you would when searching the Web, but not in ways you’d like to when looking for files or email on your hard disk. The interface is bare-bones Google, which is fine for the Web, but not suited for when you’re looking for files, and then working with them on your PC.

Don’t expect either of these search tools to change drastically. Google has applied the Web approach to searching and applied it to your computer. Microsoft instead applied what it knows about Windows, Outlook, and documents. And the winner, without a doubt, is Microsoft.

You can buy the report titled Discourage Broad Use of the Google Search Tool from Gartner’s site here.

Looking for Google pictures for some news story ?

At Google Press Center, you will find Google images in low and high resolution formats which you can use in your blog posts. Ofcourse don’t forget to read the permissions page.


Interested in the history of the Google epic, read The Google Timeline here.


The Google Press Center offers a nice and compact view of what’s up at the Google Search Center.

Sabeer Bhatia is back with new ideas

The first, Telixo.com, came about after Bhatia’s handheld ran out of power and he scrambled to find the details of a meeting he had scheduled in India. Forced to wake up his assistant in the middle of the night in California, he wanted to find a simple way to access his entire schedule and contacts via the mobile phone.


He settled upon text messaging as the solution. Users of the service can upload or sync their contacts, notes and calendars to Telixo and request information via SMS. For instance, sending a text message “.cal 12 13 04” to Telixo will receive a reply with all meetings scheduled for that day.


Another Bhatia company now in beta is Hotseasons.com, a travel site that focuses on hotel ratings. The idea sprouted from his personal frustration with travel research.


"I found that in doing hotel research online, all the hotels sounded the same," he said. "You arrive, and the room they give you is really [bad, ] but they call it a ‘suite’ because it has a kitchen table."


These aren’t Bhatia’s first follow-ups to Hotmail, which he sold to Microsoft Corp. for $400 million. His Arzoo.com succumbed to the dot-com bust, but as CEO of Navin Communications Inc., he’s turned the India-based company into one of the country’s leading voicemail providers. In 2000, he also invested in anti-spam firm IronPort Systems Inc., which recently closed a Series D funding round of $45 million.


"I’m having fun with this," he said. "This is a new way of entrepreneurship—doing a bunch of these at one time."


Via Hotmail Founder Has Lots More in Store

Download the latest Adobe Reader update

Adobe Reader 6.0.3 update

This update addresses several potential vulnerabilities in
Adobe Reader versions 6.0.0-6.0.2. Note that currently there are no known malicious exploits of these vulnerabilities.

Adobe recommends that all users of Adobe Reader 6.0 apply
this update as a proactive measure.

This update addresses three issues:

- Preventing playback of malicious content in Flash media
embedded in a PDF File. For more information see Adobe
Knowledgebase article #321328 

- Vulnerabilities in the PNG library (libpng version 1.2.5) that could be exploited with malformed PNG images. For more information see CAN-2004-0597.

- An issue with how the eBook plug-in works with *.etd files during eBook transactions. For more information see CAN-2004-1153.

Download Adobe Acrobate 6.03 Update here. (1.8 Mb)

Via Adobe Reader 6.0.3 update - English, Japanese - Adobe Reader for Windows - Downloads

Ask Jeeves joins the Desktop Search race

Ask Jeeves Desktop Search


The battle is definitely on with AJ.com announcing its plans to release a test version of its desktop search tool.


Daniel Reade, vice president of product management at Ask Jeeves, said many of the releases and announcements were an effort to keep up in the search arms race. Ask Jeeves announced its desktop plans in June, when it acquired desktop search firm Tuckaroo.


"To be a major search player going forward, you’re going to need all the access points to search," he said. He thinks users eventually will access search engines through the Web, browser toolbars, desktop search applications and mobile devices.


Ask Jeeves positions its desktop search tool as more user friendly than offerings from competitors. It lets users control the speed of the indexing and which files are cataloged. The tool is integrated with common Windows dialogue boxes. For example, when opening a folder, an Ask Jeeves Desktop Search box appears for quick searching. The tool also can draw on My Jeeves, Ask Jeeves’ personalization feature that lets users save and search Internet sites they have visited.


Ask Jeeves’ application, called Ask Jeeves Desktop Search, is small at 750KB and will be shortly available for download here. PCWorld has some details about the tool here.


Ask Jeeves Desktop Search features a two-panel user interface that shows results on one side and previews on the other side. During this test period, often referred to in the industry as a beta period, Ask Jeeves will gather feedback from users to improve the product. A final version of the product is slated for next year, and it will feature more support for Outlook, an integration of PC and Web results, and support for Adobe PDF files.


Designed to let users find files and information stored in their PCs, Ask Jeeves Desktop Search indexes and retrieves a variety of files, such as Microsoft Office documents, Microsoft Outlook e-mail messages, multimedia files, and applications. The tool lets users narrow queries through a variety of parameters, such as searching only Microsoft Office documents or image files, and lets users sort the results in multiple ways. Users can also determine the parts of their hard drive they want indexed.


Lanzone said Ask Jeeves chose not to include IM sessions because of privacy concerns.


Leterme writes: The question that should start popping people’s heads is, why are all these companies suddenly introducing these software utilities, and is there more to come? Is it possible we’ll see Alexa, Ilse, Lycos or other competitors jump in as well?


Tech Notes: Ask Jeeves Desktop Search works with Windows 2000 or XP, Office 2000 or higher, and Outlook 2003. The program requires a minimum of a Pentium III computer running at 400MHz with 128 MB RAM (1 GHz and 256 MB RAM recommended). Sorry, not Mozilla or Mac compatibility.

MSN Toolbar Suite fails to get a place on my desktop

I installed MSN Toolbar Suite today, must say the installation was very smooth, I even tried it for some ten minutes but then, I was looking for my Add/Remove Programs shortcut to delete it.

The only thing good about this suite is its interface which is typical Microsoft, and impressive.

Apart from that, none of the features seemed to have impressed me. I will stick with my Copernic suite which offers me “Search as you type” feature alongwith inbuilt file viewers for most of the file types. Its so strange that for indexing Outlook items, Outlook application needs to be running. This requirement is coming from a company that has developed both Outlook and the Toolbar Suite ? I am so disappointed.

I might try the next versions of MSN suite if they promise to support .CHM and .HLP files.

Read my related post: What I look for in an Ideal Desktop Search Product ?

Donate your computer power for treatment of diseases.

Google would like to request your help with Google Compute, a new feature for the Google Toolbar. By turning on this feature, you enable your computer to work on complex problems when it would otherwise be idle. The work it does is automatically sent via the Internet to researchers who combine it with information sent by thousands of other users.


The first beneficiary of this effort is Folding@home, a non-profit research project at Stanford University that is trying to understand the structure of proteins so they can develop better treatments for a number of illnesses. In the future Google Compute may allow you to donate your computing time to other worthwhile endeavors, including projects to improve Google and its services.


The Google Compute feature of the Google Toolbar shouldn’t affect your regular computing activities and you can easily disable it at any time for any reason.


Google Compute is designed to run even on low-bandwidth connections such as modems. The total amount of data transferred per month is generally under 20MB. In more detail: Each work unit and corresponding result totals approximately a megabyte in size and typically takes two to three days to complete. The files that need to be downloaded at install time are around 1MB in size. Updates to the Folding@home client and scientific core occur generally every few months, and are around 500Kb-750Kb.


Via Google Compute

MSN Desktop Search Toolbar Suite - What the web is thinking ?

My first thought - MSN Desktop Search doesn’t work on Firefox, you need to dowload another 6 MB iFilter file from Adobe.com to support indexing PDF files, the desktop search is integrated with the toolbar - no stand alone app, it can index almost all the office file types, text, web pages and emails. So the gist is that I don’t get any new feature from this tool that my existing Copernic or X1 or blinkX doesn’t offer. So I better wait and watch for the next version.


If you are using a browser other than IE, you get this warning Warning! Your browser does not meet the minimum system requirements. You are recommended to use the MSN Toolbar Suite with Internet Explorer 5.01 or later.

All the following comments have been picked from the blogs of some great minds on the web with due credits to the authors at the end of the post.

The last hour I’ve been playing with the new MSN Toolbar Suite Beta and I’m very impressed! I’m using Scoble’s Desktop Search Reviewer’s Guide to write down my first impressions. I’ve learned a lot by watching the videos over at Channel 9: highly recommended!

• Index time: I cheated a little bit on this one, I choose the “Index Now” option and after a couple of minutes more than 12.000 files were indexed. Now I’m noticing that 5.000 files are left to index, so the Toolbar Suite has found some more files to index after an hour or so.
  
  
• What can it do, and what can’t it do? Maybe this one is a little bit early to judge, but so far it finds everything as expected.
  
  
• Performance degradation: The full index raised my processor usage to around 20%, and the Toolbar Suite process took about 14 MB of memory. Once the initial full index was done, the memory usage has dropped to around 2 MB which is very acceptable. I can’t notice any performance degradation while working, when the computer is idle and there’s some stuff that needs to be indexed, the indexing process starts again. But when you continue working, the indexing stops immediately. It seems that when you’re on battery power indexing is disabled as well, nice!
  
  
• User interface: People who know probably know that I’m a smart client type-a-guy, so I’m very happy that MSN Toolbar Suite comes with a very nice GUI. The UI resembles the web interface of search.msn.com, but you get all the rich client features like: drag-and-drop, right click, context menus, responsive UI, … This is great!
  
  
• Security/privacy: I haven’t looked into this one yet, but my guess is that the team did notmake the same mistakes as the Google Desktop Search team did in the beginning. IE history is not indexed, and the indexing is performed with a normal account (non-admin).
  
  
• Does it play well with others? No idea, I didn’t like the Google approach (web interface) so I didn’t install it.
  
  
• Does it work on other machines? I’ve tried it on my laptop and desktop, and on a couple of VPC’s, so far so good: no problems to report.
  
  
• Advertising? Nope!
  
  
• Integration: I think this one is (as always) one of the strong points of the Microsoft branded product. You get a nice integration with IE, Outlook and Windows. The only remark: when you search from within Outlook, a new window is opened. In my opinion showing the results inside Outlook would be more appropriate.
  
  
• Price: the price is right, thank you Microsoft.
  
  
• Download size: this one isn’t an issue for me, the download is around 5 MB.
  
  
• File types: Of course all the office documents are indexed perfectly. I haven’t tried more exotic file types.
  
  
• Search results: as I mentioned it finds everything as expected!
  
  
• Customizable: the MSN Desktop Search comes with a fair amount of properties. I think “normal” users won’t get lost in them, and “power” users will be able to tweak the system.
  
  
• Advanced features: so far I’m impressed but more on these one later on.
  
  
• Space for the logo: you can’t seem to hide the MSN logo, but I don’t think that’s a problem. At least it doesn’t bother me.
  
  

  Here is what other great minds think about MSN Toolbar (Desktop Search)
  
  

  • Darren Barefoot: Forgive me for being underwhelmed, but maybe this should have been in the frickin’ operating system years ago, eh?
    
    
  • Jan Tielens took my reviewers guide and filled it in.
    
    
  • Joe Wilcox, over on Microsoft Monitor, says he’s still having performance problems. He calls it MSNFS.
    
    
  • Jonathan Hardwick: Leave it alone (among other tips)
    
    
  • J. Gregg Thomason: This whole stupid search craze is just a symptom of what’s wrong with the industry.
    
    
  • Zmarties: “I’m pleased to see implements “search as you type.”
    
    
  • Patrick Tisseghem: it looks excellent.
    
    
  • Joel Ross: It doesn’t install on Windows 2003. So I can’t tell you anything about it.
    
    
  • Peter Laudati: While Google search still rocks on the Internet, MSN has clearly got a better product when it comes to the desktop!
    
    
  • Paul Thurrott: reviews MSN Toolbar Suite.
    
    
  • Bradley Johnson: Two months late to Google Desktop party.
    
    
  • sendung.de: Yes, trust is an issue in desktop search.
    
    
  • Buzz Bruggeman: It is working great.
    
    
  • Shannon: Looks like MS has a real product here.
    
    
  
  I’m impressed! My computer is still being indexed as I write and I’m watching the demo video and I’m very impressed. I loved the Google desktop search but it didn’t allow you to interact with the files like the MSN desktop search does. Here are some of the features that I’ve picked up from the videos and from my quick use of it.
  
  

• Launch web sites directly from the deskbar
  
  
• Launch any app from the deskbar. Just type =[appname] e.g. =cmd for a command prompt
  
  
• Create shortcuts and shortcuts with query terms
  
  
• Transfer your shortcuts to other machines
  
  
• Launch files from the desktop search results
  
  
• Shell commands are integrated into the search results so that you can queue MP3’s, unzip files, print emails, etc
  
  
• Images returned in the results also have thumbnails (great feature!). Powerpoint files also come with a thumbnail but it’s a little small to be of much use
  
  
• Desktop search examines the ID tags of MP3s so that you can easily search by artist, album or title
  
  
• Index network drives
  
  
• Reply to emails that are returned in the result

Being the MSN geek I am I hightailed it to http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/ to try out the the new Toolbar suite. So far the only part that has held my interest is the MSN Toolbar for Outlook which looks like a decent replacement for LookOut. The desktop search doesn’t really interest me because I don’t lose files on my hard drive and the Internet Explorer toolbar adds just a tad bit of clutter to IE (see below for screenshot). I use the Yahoo! toolbar all the time since it has my bookmarks and links to a lot of Yahoo! services I use (Maps, Movies, Mail, Finance, etc). I use the Google toolbar for search. The MSN toolbar doesn’t really give me anything I want enough to lose the screen real estate although the quick links to MSN Spaces are nice. If you haven’t installed any of the other toolbars then the MSN toolbar is as good as any of he others since the core functionality is the same but it doesn’t have enough to get someone like me who’s already using two IE add-in toolbars to add a third.

Via http://weblogs.asp.net/jan

Via http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/12/13.html#a8887

Via http://xo.typepad.com/blog/2004/12/msn_desktop_sea.html

What filetypes can MSN Desktop Search index ?

Looking for e-mail, documents or photos?


MSN Desktop Search lets you search your computer for documents and files, photos and videos, music, and Outlook and Outlook Express items such as e-mail messages, contacts, and appointments. Desktop Search lets you search your computer for many types of files.


File types you can search


You can search all of the content in most common document file types, including text files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Outlook and Outlook Express items, and web pages. In addition, if you installed the Adobe plug-in when you installed MSN Toolbar Suite, you can search all of the content of PDF files.


You can search for keywords in the titles of music, image, and video files, as well as program executable files.


Locations you can search


Desktop Search lets you search files in all indexed locations. By default, Desktop Search indexes your e-mail files and all files saved in the My Documents folder.


However, you can have Desktop Search index other locations, including network drives.


See this great resource for all questions related to MSN Toolbar.

Via Toolbar Help

Why use Yahoo Desktop Search over other tools ?

The Yahoo-branded application, available in early January, will let people search their PCs as well as the Web via Yahoo Search, but future iterations will include navigation for Yahoo’s instant messenger archives, address book and free e-mail service.

Why should you use Yahoo! Desktop Search (X1) instead of other desktop search tools:

Relevance: Ability to pivot data by any dimension: recency, creator, recipient, type, etc.

Comprehensiveness: Ability to index 225+ data types, email attachments.

Freshness:V1.0 Beta: Scheduled in increments ,V1.0: near real time

Presentation:Rich native user-interface Search-as-you-type, previews, post-search actions.

Monitor your upload/download statistics (bandwidth usage)

RAS Graph & Stats is a network/dialup monitor and stats tool. It provides real time graph of traffic. Detailed stats provide daily/weekly/monthly/yearly stats/user defined range. Stop watch. etc..


This app which makes it so easy to monitor bandwidth, basically picks up where the old NetStat left off by providing stats for network card (cable/dsl/etc)


RAS G&S is freeware and now Win9x/Win2k/XP compatible. It is definitely the best bandwidth monitor out there in the Free category.


Download RAS Graph & Stats here.


Via RAS Graph & Stats v1.20

A 3D Desktop (GUI) for Windows OS

The SphereXP is a 3D desktop replacement for Microsoft Windows XP. Taking the known concept of three-dimensional desktops to its own level. It offers a new way to organize objects on the desktop such a icons and applications.

See more screenshots of The SphereXP here.

Please keep in mind that project is more of a vision. Due to the limitations of Windows I’m not able to do everything as I would like to. I know it is still not very usable, but I’ll try to make it work as I can. I hope when there’s time for it, this theory will have a satisfying implementation.

The Sphere is theory of an 3D workspace. The SphereXP is an example of the theory. The environment is user-centered. It is represented by a sphere. The user is exactly in the middle of it. All objects are situated around the user. He can easily turn around and manipulate with the objects. All the objects that users are used to having on their regular desktop are now integrated in a three-dimensional environment. . There are icons and applications. They can be move around according to some rules. You can bring them closer to the view port or send them back.

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Via CNet Newsletter

What's happening ? AOL to Use Copernic for Desktop Search

While Yahoo has announced a deal with X1, AOL’s pact with Copernic is a smarter move. X1 is processor-heavy and RAM intensive, which means that Yahoo will have to trim it down a lot, in order to make a free download feasible. Meanwhile, Copernic is more efficient and less draining - I’ve never seen a slowdown with it installed - and should be a more compelling download.


The company plans its own desktop search application that is packaged as part of the new AOL browser that’s in beta testing. Any AOL member can access this by signing into AOL, then using the keyword “beta” to reach the beta download area. I’ve just downloaded the beta but haven’t had a chance to play with it. But the desktop search is powered by Copernic, another well regarded desktop search app.


Just recently, Mamma acquired Copernic and now AOL plans to use Copernic Technology. Wow !! So much is happening and that also so fast. It is not long before I need a search tool to tell me which all desktop search tools I have installed on my hard drive.


Via Search Engine Lowdown and SEWatch.

A Letter from Josh Jacobs, the President of X1

Josh Jacobs, President X1

As you may have heard, Yahoo! has chosen X1 Technologies to power their consumer desktop search solution. X1 has spent the last couple of years working with our users to build and evolve the most robust desktop search technology on the market and believe that partnering with Yahoo!, a leading Search Engine, presents X1 with enormous opportunity from a distribution perspective. Yahoo! has been intently focused on developing advanced search technology, along with products that compliment the experience and we are pleased to be working with them on their desktop search initiative.

Because of our partnership with Yahoo!, millions of computer users will now be able to increase their personal productivity via the power of X1 Desktop Search technology. We believe this partnership validates our expertise as the leader in desktop search and are excited to have millions of people using the most robust search experience available.

Over the coming weeks you can expect to see a number of announcements from X1 and Yahoo! as we continue to bring best of breed products to the customers we serve. Yahoo! is a leader in providing great products to consumers, and this partnership will allow Yahoo!’s customers access to the best solutions in desktop search, designed for their needs. For X1, this represents an opportunity for us to continue our work on pioneering full-featured desktop search for businesses.

X1’s success is due in large part to you, our customers, and the tremendous feedback you have provided us with over the years. We are looking forward to continuing this relationship as we continue to develop innovative products to help you manage your information. As always we welcome your feedback, comments, and questions. Especially now, as we embark on the next leg of our journey, I’d like to ask all of you for your thoughts on how X1 can continue to deliver great products and solutions for you and your business. Please feel free to drop me an email (josh_jacobs@x1.com). All of us at X1 are very excited about the future, and looking forward to continuing to bring you great products.

Josh Jacobs, President, X1 Technologies (josh@X1.com)