Recently, I've been very busy working on a project that I'm very passionate about and that I personally view as an important community project really. Today, I think it's gotten to a stage where I can launch it for everyone to check out and have access to. The project is StartUpArabia, a weblog dedicated to new Arab technology startups and services, profiling and reviewing them, providing interesting market news and information, and sharing tips and advice for the entrepreneurs behind them. In addition to covering these new startups, existing services and companies that are making interesting new changes and...
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Yahoo rolled out video sharing on Flickr this week. They're trying to position Flickr Video not as another video-sharing site and YouTube rival, but as a useful addition to Flickr's core business: a web platform for adding and sharing photos. Flickr will make video available in eight languages: English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese. Users can upload up to 90 seconds of footage, with a maximum size of 150 MB, from any recording device. They can organize and share videos the same way they handle photos, using tags, geotags, sets, and privacy settings. Videos can be uploaded...
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Suzuki announced its Crosscage motorcycle concept at Tokyo Motor Show last November, and have recently announced that they're putting it into production. But, other than it's really cool design, what's most important about this bike is that it is going to be hydrogen powered, read extra clean for the environment. The bike developed in conjuction with British Intelligent Energy is powered by a lightweight air-cooled fuel-cell system and a high-performance secondary lithium-ion battery. What can I say but awesome design and bravo for the use of clean energy to run this beauty. I hope every other manufacturer follows suit. [Via:...
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AltSearchEngines posted yesterday asking people to try, for one day, one of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines; it can be one search engine, they can be several, the idea is just to give them a try, a chance, and see what life would be like without Google Search. I think it should be a very interesting experiment to stay off from Google Search for a day, and try out other alternative search engines instead. It should show us what other options we have out there, how advanced and reliable they are, and how dependent we are on Google. Personally,...
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Tunisia is one of the countries with the highest mobile penetration in the region at 78% in 2007 and expected to reach as high as 108% by 2010. But not only do most Tunisians have mobile phones, they also have the mobile phone craze, following every new model, keeping up with all the new features and little cool additions. Obviously, one of the areas, most mobile phone makers are making strides in and focusing on, are the photo capabilities of their mobile phones, or should we call them photo phones now. One such case is the Samsung G800 which was...
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uTest, a global marketplace for software application testing, as they define themselves, is now open for business. The startup takes a crowd-sourcing approach to testing software bugs coupled with a Pay Per Bug business model; Anyone can sign up to test software and make some cash along the way. On the other hand uTest's customers gain access to a large, diverse and global community of software testing individuals, who will help with their QA testing over uTest's secure testing platform, which provides a hosted infrastructure to manage complete software QA cycles and projects. Software application testers who are part of...
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WOW... Microsoft Corp. has pounced on slumping Internet icon Yahoo Inc. with an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion in its boldest bid yet to challenge Google Inc.'s dominance of the lucrative online search and advertising markets. The surprise offer of $31 per share, made late Thursday and announced Friday, comes with Sunnyvale-based Yahoo in a vulnerable position. In a statement Friday, Yahoo said it will "carefully and promptly" study Microsoft's bid. [...] In a letter to Yahoo's board of directors, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer indicated the world's largest software maker is determined to bring the two companies together....
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Internet goes down, everything goes down... Life came to a standstill in Dubai, home of the renowned "Media City" and modern "electronic government," after an extensive Internet failure affected much of the United Arab Emirates... [...] Besides the Internet, the outage caused major disruption to television and phone services, creating chaos for the UAE's public and private sectors. [...] The outage heavily crippled Dubai's business section, which is heavily reliant on electronic means for billions of dollars' worth of transactions daily. [Source: CNN] And all around the Middle East and beyond as well: Internet services and usage have been disrupted...
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Remember those bionic eyes some of our favorite sci-fi characters had to zoom in on far-away things, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs? Well those could become an attainable reality for everyone soon enough. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside; opening many doors for useful applications of these contact...
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Just a couple of days ago I was wondering when GPS would finally make it to Tunisia, and to my great surprise today, by accident, I came across a new website launched by Tunisia's first private mobile operator Tunisiana publicizing a new product they're launching called GPS Weenee. (Weenee in Arabic means: Where am I? or Where is it?) The product should be currently available at Tunisiana's service centers in the Grand Tunis area: Les Jardins du Lac, La Marsa (Zephyr), Ariana, Medina, Tunis-Carthage Airport. The details of the service are as follows: - Coverage: The Grand Tunis area and...
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Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research has launched an eight-month contest to lure software engineers and researchers to develop the next generation of search engines, offering them a cash prize of $100,000. The aim is build a search engine that works across multiple media platforms, that not only searches for text in websites but also for terms within music and video files. The top five teams will be flown to Singapore for the finals at Fusionopolis, a science and technology research centre set to open in October. An international advisory panel will oversee the competition. Applicants have a registration...
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Blogger is finally available in Arabic, and two other Middle Eastern right-to-left languages: Hebrew and Persian. Besides localizing the Blogger interface into these three languages, they have added right-to-left templates and new toolbar buttons for bi-directional text editing in the post editor. I think it's great that they've done this, it will make a lot of people's lives easier. I know many people who've been using Blogger to publish their blogs in several languages like Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hebrew for some time now. Some of these people who have a little technical know-how were able to play around with...
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Apple just introduced the world's thinnest laptop in this year's MacWorld. The MacBook Air turned out to be a reality, and what a beautiful, amazing reality it is. Features - .16 to .76-inch thickness on top - Weighs only 3 pounds - 5 hours of battery life with everything running - Intel Core 2 Duo Processor at 1.6 or 1.8GHz - Motherboard the length of a pencil - 13.3-inch screen, LED backlit - 2GB RAM standard - 1.8-inch 80GB HD or 64GB Solid State Drive - Multitouch trackpad with gestures. Pans, zooms, rotates, etc. - 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1 -...
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Questler is a new online service that was launched into public beta a couple of months ago and which has an interesting social networking approach to learning online, finding answers to questions, and acquiring/sharing knowledge. The idea of the website stems from the belief that everyone is a learner, seeking more knowledge on certain topics, and that learning best occurs when individuals interact with each other in free spaces, informally, to share knowledge and collaboratively create ideas. So in other words, the goal is to try to tap into the collective knowledge of the crowd to acquire and share knowledge....
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Interesting news from NewsGator... NewsGator announced today the general availability of NetNewsWire 3.1, FeedDemon 2.6, and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. The public beta of NewsGator Inbox 3.0 also began today. [...] NewsGator also announced that all of its client RSS reader products are now available free of charge and include free synchronization along with other services. Users can now enjoy the great features and performance of all of NewsGator’s Web, desktop and mobile readers for iPhone, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry (powered by FreeRange), all synchronized to provide the same view of their RSS content no matter when or...
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AOL just announced that Netscape Navigator, the browser that launched the commercial Internet in October 1994, and that they acquired in November 1998 as part of their Netscape Communications Corp. acquisition deal for $4.2 billion, will die on February 1, 2008. Netscape Navigator is currently at version 9. Recent surveys suggest that Netscape currently has only 0.6% market share among browsers, compared to Internet Explorer's 77.35% and Firefox's 16.01%. This is down from more than 90 percent of the market in the 90s, when the browser wars began, then the Microsoft antitrust trial took place, before IE took over as...
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Mezed is a new Tunisian auction site that recently surfaced into the arena of online startups in Tunisia. A number of Tunisian startups/websites have already been launched to try and push through the idea of online auctions in Tunisia, get it popular, and attempt to make some money out of it. Examples off the top of my head are sites like: MoncefBay and EchriBay. A lot of these services hang on for a while before fading away into Tunisian internet history now. The auction model just hasn't taken off and worked up to now, for one reason or another. Websites...
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Brijit is a pretty interesting new service that takes long-form content and boils it down to 100 words or less, giving users abstracts that attempt to summarize, review and rate the original content, passing along the basic necessary information to the user and making it easier for them to choose what to dive deeper into by going back to the original content. The abstracts are written by freelancers, with the possibility for anyone to join in, and these freelancers get paid $5 for every published abstract. It's also possible for others to leave comments/other takes on an abstract. The abstracts...
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ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers have launched an evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names this week that allows Internet users to test top-level domains in 11 languages. This evaluation represents ICANN’s most important step so far towards the full implementation of Internationalized Domain Names; One of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created The evaluation is made possible by the insertion into the root of the 11 versions of .test, which means they are alongside other top-level domains like .net, .com, .info, .uk, and .de at the core of the Internet. Since Monday, 15...
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Facebook and all those social networking sites out there not really your kind of thing? You'd rather be left alone? You feel you have more people that you hate than people you like? Then Hatebook is the site for you... The first anti-social networking site, where you can connect with the people you hate... Upload blackmail material or publish lies, get the latest gossip from your enemies and friends, post photos and videos on your hate profile, tag your friends, get hate points from disturbing people who live, study, or work around you, simply take over the world... Hatebook looks...
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Now this would be really cool and efficient... Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years. Although betavoltaic batteries sound Nuclear they’re not, they neither use fission/fusion or chemical processes to produce energy and so (do not...
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Brainstorming is an essential element in any creative process, it allows the flow of different ideas between all team members without the limits of a tightly structured meeting, only using general guidelines and a common goal as a framework for the exchange. BrainReactions.net is a new service that allows you to take your brainstorming sessions online, keep track of them and even tap into the intelligence of the crowds. Using their tool, you can create your own private Brainstorming rooms, in which you set your question/topic and invite your team members or the people you want to work with in...
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Mango is a newly launched online web service that provides free enterprise level language learning courses. It initially provides a choice of 11 language courses, each course made up of 100 lessons, and each lesson including between 70 and 150 slides. The 11 languages covered are: Spanish, Russian, French, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, German, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Greek, English for Spanish speakers, and English for Polish speakers. Like other language learning software, Mango shows and plays conversations between two people in a number of social setups and situations. Then it goes into detail in the following slides, dissecting and recombining the...
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With proprietary operating systems increasingly designed to restrict and control the user, with digital 'restrictions' management, their users are subjugated even more now than before. If you don't want chains on your hand and foot, your only escape is to switch to a free operating system. -- Richard Stallman...
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I just came across a great list of things every new programmer should know for their first job on Apple Matters, and I thought I'd share it with you guys here. I personally confirm all the ten points in the list from my own experience. The list goes as follows: 1. Being liked is easy 2. Being respected is hard 3. Everything you learned in college is useless 4. Never stop learning 5. You live or die by your text editor, so choose wisely 6. No one really cares what college you went to 7. Silence never goes out of...
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After a long time coming (long in terms of our internet era time) Google has finally launched the third piece in their online office suite: Google Presentations (or Presently as some people are calling it), a presentation product that targets the needs of the audience using Microsoft's PowerPoint. Presentations can be imported from existing files or created using the new slide editor. They can be edited, shared, and published using the familiar Google Docs interface, with several collaborators working on a slide deck simultaneously, in real time. When presenting the slides, participants can simply click a link to follow along...
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A really interesting and promising bit of news... An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water science discovery in a century. John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn. The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a...
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Google has gone ahead and launched Sky in Google Earth, a new functionality that will be adding space imagery to Google Earth's extensive maps and imagery of planet Earth. Google's announcement says that with this functionality "You can now explore the universe from the comfort of your chair. Zoom in to distant galaxies hundreds of millions of light years away, explore the constellations, see the planets in motion, witness a supernova explosion; it's like having a giant, virtual telescope at your command -- your own personal planetarium!" According to TechCrunch, the space imagery used in this new functionality includes over...
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Springtime's Bike Dispenser is a sort of vending machine that allows you to rent an RFID-tracked bike from one stand, ride it to your destination, drop it off at another stand, and then walk away. The Dutch company won an award at the 2007 Spark Design & Architecture Awards for their idea, which works perfectly for an urban environment. Very cool and practical idea... I love it... [Via: Gizmodo, Trendhunter]...
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There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. -- C.A.R. Hoare...
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I just love this... A great new way to represent percentage-based statistics instead of the traditional pie chart. - The chart on the left is from a NY Times story on atheism and the afterlife, and was created by Charles M. Blow. - On the right, a detail from a Wired story on how much Americans spend on gadgets, and was created by Arno Ghelfi. Very creative and more representative and accurate I think. [Via: Anil Dash]...
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In the tech circles, we almost always get carried away by all the greatness of Google and its products, that we forget that Google too is not perfect. Yep, Google too have made a number of big mistakes; and here's the top 10 list according to me, a loyal fan. 1. Google Web accelerator: The idea behind this product was to speed up page loading for users and all as it name suggests, but the product went down amid privacy concerns, web application problems resulting from the system and Google's announced inability to handle all the traffic. 2. Picasa Web...
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Ever since I converted to Firefox, I haven't really looked back; I have tested other browsers for the sake of it, but never really considered moving to another one. What makes Firefox even more interesting and exciting for me as a user is the various extensions I can plug into to it to extend its functionalities. The following is the list of my top 5 Firefox extensions: 1. Web Developer: This is an essential extension for anyone who is involved with web development or design in any way. 2. Firebug: Another great plugin for web developers and designers; enabling you...
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Information Architects have released their Web Trend Map for 2007, a subway map of the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective. Here's the larger version. Another interesting way of presenting all these online services that have come into our lives. [Via: TechCrunch]...
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Wellington Grey has created a periodic table representing some of the internet's most popular sites. The different web services are grouped into the categories: Search Engines, Internet Tools, Site Ranking, Aggregators, Webcomics, Productivity, Get Stuff, Operating Systems, Miscellaneous, Blogs, Social Networking, Podcasts, Videos and News. Of course, not everything is on there, but I find it an interesting graphic nonetheless. [Source: Wellington Grey] [Via: Download Squad]...
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I just found a great article on ZDNet with ten tips to being a better IT manager. I couldn't agree more with the points on the list; this article is a must-read for anyone taking on a management position in an IT environment. The list goes as follows: 1. Spend time (and money) developing your people 2. Get to know what your staff really does 3. Don't do it for them 4. Know the business and make sure they know you 5. Treat communication as a busy, fast-moving, two-way street 6. Encourage everyone to work as a team 7. Provide...
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I just came across an interesting article on Fast Company about the 6 myths of creativity. Their list goes as follows: 1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types 2. Money Is a Creativity Motivator 3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity 4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs 5. Competition Beats Collaboration 6. A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization I totally agree; these beliefs that many people in management positions hold about creativity and what triggers it are simply wrong and have nothing to do with reality. Even if they hold in one case or another, it's obvious they are not the rule, and that...
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So here's the current top 10 list of the richest people in the tech world. Bill Gates has dropped to second place, not just in tech, but in the overall world listing. 1. Carlos Slim Helú Net worth: $67.8 billion Company: Telmex, América Móvil, Grupo Carso 2. William H. Gates III Net Worth: $59.2 billion Company: Microsoft 3. Lawrence Ellison Net Worth: $21.5 billion Company: Oracle 4. Paul Allen Net Worth: $18.0 billion Company: Microsoft 5 & 6. Sergey Brin & Larry Page Net Worth: $16.6 billion (each) Company: Google 7. Michael Dell Net Worth: $15.8 billion Company: Dell 8....
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I just came across an article on ComputerWorld that lists the top 10 dead or dying computer skills; the list goes as follows: 1. Cobol 2. Nonrelational DBMS 3. Non-IP networks 4. cc:Mail 5. ColdFusion 6. C programming 7. PowerBuilder 8. Certified NetWare Engineers 9. PC network administrators 10. OS/2 Wow, that list brings back a lot of memories of things I used to use or that I had on my list of things to check out, learn or use. It's amazing how much changes in so little time when it comes to the IT/Computer industry; but still we wouldn't...
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Imagine a future in which wireless power transfer is feasible: cell phones, household robots, mp3 players, laptop computers, and other portable electronics capable of charging themselves without ever being plugged in, freeing us from that final, ubiquitous power wire. Some of these devices might not even need their bulky batteries to operate. Well that future could be just around the corner; A team at MIT led by Prof. Marin Soljacic has experimentally demonstrated an important step toward accomplishing this vision of the future, they were able to light a 60W light-bulb from a power source more than 2 meters away,...
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Moving towards greener computing... In an initiative to improve computer power use - equivalent to shutting down twenty 500 megawatt coal-fired power plants - Google and Intel have set up the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. The forty starting members, including AMD, Dell, HP, IBM and Sun, hope to better manage power-delivery and power management of computers to achieve this by 2010. Suppliers, businesses and individuals are being asked to join and help save $5.5 billion in energy costs. Servers and PCs waste lots of power from the moment it enters their power cables. Google's SVP for operations, Urs Holzle, said:...
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Today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will be taking the wraps off "Milan", a project five years in the making, and the first of what the company is calling a "surface computer". The Microsoft Surface tabletop PC, for which the company has created both the hardware and software, turns an ordinary tabletop into a dynamic surface that provides interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. The surface computer will be able to recognize physical objects and allow hands-on, direct control of content such as photos, music and maps. Although these computers will be...
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According to the latest statistics released by w3counter.com, Firefox’s market share has risen to over 25 percent of the browser market. W3Counter found that IE6 was used by 49.5 percent of visitors, while IE7 was favoured by 16.8 percent. This gives Microsoft a 66.3 percent share of the overall market, a significant drop if compared to the 85 percent penetration it enjoyed according to a Web Analytics study in November 2005. Hooray... Long live Firefox... google_ad_client = "pub-4495843892691656"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as_rimg"; google_cpa_choice = "CAAQ8aaVzgEaCEys199bP_E2KOm293MwAA"; google_ad_channel = "9305504264"; //-->...
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Google has just announced the launch of Web History, a new feature for Google Account users that makes it easy to view and search across the pages they previously visited. This will help users find things they remember seeing online a lot faster from anywhere. To use this new feature, all that's needed is a Google Account and the Google Toolbar with PageRank enabled. Search History users will notice that it has been renamed to Web History to reflect this new functionality, where they will find both their search history and their browsing history. Of course a number of people...
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According to a post on GigaOm, FTTH Council is pushing the US government to adopt a 100 Megabit Nation policy with the goal of extending, through both private and public sector initiatives, affordable next-generation broadband (100-megabit-per-second connection) to a majority of Americans by 2010, with universal US availability by 2015. Hmmm... On the other hand, over here in Tunisia: I had to wait for over 3 months for Tunisie Telecom to give me a crappy phone line... During the first two years, my phone line worked only a quarter of the time... I've been waiting for over 7 months to...
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A new interesting game is out, aiming to eat away at World of Warcraft's domination of the MMORPG market, and it goes by the name: The Lord Of The Rings Online - Shadows Of Angmar. I guess the name says it all; it's simply a multi-player game, read online middle-earth, based on the amazing trilogy of J.R.R. Tolkien. You get to create a unique character that can be either a Man, Elf, Dwarf or Hobbit; you choose what class you want it to be from (Champion, Guardian, Burglar, Captain, Hunter, Minstrel, or Lore-master), and where it hails from, his/her skin,...
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The BBC, through CBBC, the channel for 7-12 year olds, will be launching an online virtual world for children, quite similar to Second Life. CBBC World, as it will be called, will offer youngsters a safe environment to explore, and provide them with different zones offering CBBC content. As in Second Life, children will be able to create virtual versions of themselves on-screen, called avatars. Their characters can then move around CBBC World. They will also be able to take part in games, animations, videos and music, create their own content and send their work to other CBBC World users...
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Apple has used the CES to finally confirm the existence of the iPhone and to release details and specifications. The full specs are as follows: Screen size: 3.5 inches Screen resolution: 320 by 480 at 160 ppi Input method: Multi-touch Operating system: OS X Storage: 4GB or 8GB GSM: Quad-band (MHz: 850, 900, 1800, 1900) Wireless data: Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) + EDGE + Bluetooth 2.0 Camera: 2.0 megapixels Battery: Up to 5 hours Talk / Video / Browsing, Up to 16 hours Audio playback Dimensions: 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches Weight: 4.8 ounces / 135 grams The iPhone is actually...
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For a very long time, I hated mobile phones and didn't see much use for them, and honestly speaking, I still don't like them that much to this very day. I only got my first mobile phone after my first to-be-employer emailed me saying they were trying to call me on my home line to set up a job interview but weren't able to get a hold of me. After that, the idea of a mobile phone for me was mainly a device that I could use to contact whoever I wanted, anytime, anywhere I was, but as I'm not...
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Wow... This is incredible... "... an astounding half million Chinese now make a living - about $100 a month - from the acquisition and sale of WoW (World of Warcraft) gold to US and EU gamers. Why is this is the future of work online? Consider the numbers, youth, and low wages of the gold farmers, and the growing interest in outsourcing tasks online. [...] ... these gold farms indicate that the game platform has the potential to engage more people in Internet-driven economy. The gaming workers in China don’t have skills like English, software or graphic design to participate...
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Ikbis, the new service by the creative guys over at toot has gone live. After a really cool viral marketing campaign featuring "The Largest Yellow Button On The Web" and the humorous animations behind it, the service went online this morning. Ikbis, which means "Press" or "Click" in Arabic, is a cool online video and photo sharing service, sort of an Arabic cousin of YouTube and Flickr. The design is very nice, simplistic and clean; I really like the logo, the colours used and the way it's organized. Then again, I wouldn't expect anything less from the toot designers. The...
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After years of requests and debates, Sun Microsystems is going ahead and releasing Java source code under a GPL license. It plans to put the code for the programming software under the version 2 of the General Public License (GPLv2), which governs Linux and many other open-source products. The Sun-hosted Java.net Web site will provide access to Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME) software for mobile phones and Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) software for desktop applications. Sun already has open-sourced its server-side Java Platform Enterprise Edition software in a project called GlassFish. But it is now making that...
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Michael Howard, senior Security Program Manager at Microsoft, writes a list of habits any developer must have in order to get a final, secure and efficent product. The list goes as follows: Habit #1: Take Responsibility Habit #2: Never Trust Data Habit #3: Model Threats against Your Code Habit #4: Stay One Step Ahead Habit #5: Fuzz! Habit #6: Don't Write Insecure Code Habit #7: Recognize the Strategic Asymmetry Habit #8: Use the Best Tools You Can Details for every habit can be found here: 8 Simple Rules For Developing More Secure Code. I couldn't agree more... [Source: MSDN] [Via:...
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Microsoft has released a new product by the name of Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007, which is a free accounting product for small businesses. According to Microsoft: Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007, financial management software is designed for millions of starting businesses and home based businesses that currently use pen & paper or spreadsheets to run their business. It provides a single place to manage the company’s business finances with the familiar look and feel of Microsoft Office system programs. Accounting Express imports from Excel, as well as Quickbooks and Microsoft Money. Accounting Express also has a pay counterpart, Accounting...
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Ten common rationalizations people in the Information Technology world turn to whenever their authority or professionalism is challenged. They have been around as long as the modern computer and they transcend all cultural and industrial boundaries. What's worse, they have proven to be quite effective. 1. Our problems are unique 2. We never seem to have enough time to do things right 3. You are stifling our creativity 4. System design is an art form 5. Technology will solve our problems 6. A DBMS is a prerequisite for data base 7. There is an infinite amount of data in an...
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A list of the top 10 grammar mistakes that are generally found on web pages, and of course blogs as well: 1. it’s = it is 2. Web site (or page) vs. web site/page vs. Website/website (page) 3. Periods and commas: do they go inside or outside of quotation marks, or does it depend on the sentence? 4. E-mail vs. email, plus what is the plural of e-mail? 5. SEOs or SEO’s 6. Spelling 7. Hyphens 8. Their vs. there vs. they're / You vs. your vs. you're 9. Singular vs. plural 10. Commas It's true that these are the...
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Version 2.0 of Firefox, my favourite browser, which I totally recommend by the way, is finally out. I tested a couple of the beta versions in the past and liked what I saw; I can't wait to get home and install the final version on my laptop. This new version brings with it a number of new features, the ones I'm most excited about being the following: - Resuming your browsing session: The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. I've been waiting for this feature to be added...
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Microsoft have finally released the new version of their still market-dominant browser: Internet Explorer 7. It's the first new version of the Web browser since Internet Explorer 6 launched in 2001 with the Windows XP operating system. Back then Microsoft basically had no competition left in the browser market and so it announced it wouldn't be releasing any more standalone versions of Internet Explorer, and that the next version would only ship with their next OS, which we know now by the name of Windows Vista. But since then Firefox surfaced as a strong competitor which has been grabbing up...
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Yahoo and Yahoo Telemundo are creating a digitized time capsule that will beam onto an ancient pyramid in Mexico and into space. Yahoo began accepting submissions of photos, video, sounds files, video and text yesterday and said in a prepared statement that the purpose was to join the "past and present with the universe's potential future by sharing today's culture on Earth with other life that may exist light years away." The time capsule is meant to document the good and bad of life around the world in 2006. Yahoo said it expects the time capsule to be the largest...
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So the rumours were true and Google has officially announced that it will be acquiring YouTube for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community. YouTube’s 65 employees will remain with the company at YouTube’s San Bruno headquarters. It also looks like Google will continue to maintain its own online video business, which I'm not too sure is a good idea. According to Internet research firm Hitwise, YouTube has about a 46 percent share of the online video market. Still, they haven't proven their ability to make...
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Google is trying out a new search service designed to make it easier for computer programmers to find bits of code online. Google Code Search will make it easier for software developers to find programming code directly, without having to trawl through groups, forums, and discussions to find it. The search engine is aimed at both professional programmers and students or IT enthusiasts who want to improve their coding and software development. The search also allows programmers to look for specific coding terms, restrict the search to certain computer languages, or look for bits of code that fall under a...
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After a while of blogging, many bloggers start thinking about what opportunities they have to make money with their blogs. Many people draw a very rosy picture of it and say that there is a lot of money to be made off a blog, but in the end of the day, that's not fully true. How much any person can make from his blog depends on the blog, the topics he discusses, how many visitors he gets daily, how much effort he puts into it, how well he sets up his money-making options and a bunch of other things. In...
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I read about this a couple of days ago and have been wanting to write about it ever since. Microsoft has sealed a deal with director Peter Jackson, of "Lord of the Rings" and "King Kong" fame, that calls for him to create two new interactive entertainment series for Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. Jackson will be working with longtime collaborator and screenwriter Fran Walsh and Microsoft Game Studios to develop these series. The first series will be a collaborative effort with Bungie Studios to co-create the next chapter in the "Halo" universe (Halo 3). The second series will be...
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