Posted 31 Jul 2006 — by Arun
Category News
USA Today reports that a gitch in Microsoft’s voice recognition software turned the live demonstration into a bit of an embarrassment. According to the newspaper:
The trouble began when the presenter, a member of the team working on the new version of the company’s Windows operating system, gave his first voice command.
Instead of typing, “Dear mom,” as Shanen Boettcher had instructed, the computer spurted out: “Dear aunt.”
After the first round of chuckles, Boettcher said “Fix aunt,” but the words, “let’s set” appeared on the screen.
“Delete that,” he said — three times to no avail before suggesting that an echo in the room was foiling the presentation.
The loudest laughs came after he told the computer to select all, which prompted it to finish the sentence it had started with the words: “so double the killer delete select all.”
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Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space. This project is part of the Microsoft’s Live Labs team. Take a tour of Microsoft’s Photosynth.
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Posted 28 Jul 2006 — by Arun
Category News
Henrik reports in Tom’s Hardware forum that a Dell laptop in their IT department blew up. He wrote :
“One of our IT guys put out the flames (yes, I said flames) and thusly covered the entire area with fire extinguisher ‘material’. The battery burned its way straight through the laptop creating the beautiful hole with which is so beautifully depicted in the picture. The fire department showed up. The police department showed up.”
There are some photos posted in the forum. Have a look.
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Firefox 1.5.0.5 was released yesterday. Click here to find out what is fixed in Firefox 1.5.0.5. It has lots of security fixes, so I would advice everyone to update. Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 was released today. I got the update notification and upgraded without any problem. Mozilla has not yet updated their product page with the latest version. This one also has lots of securituy fixes and other bug fixes. You can find out what is fixed in Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 here.
Edit: Mozilla has updated the Thunderbird product page with the latest version.
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Posted 27 Jul 2006 — by Arun
Category News
MSNBC reports :
An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe. The galaxies within the newly found structure are packed together four times closer than the universe’s average.
Quite interesting to read.
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Click here to read the feature list of Thunderbird 2.0. Some of the interesting features include:
Folder summary tooltips: Allow users to quickly see the contents of new messages in unopened folders without forcing them to actually open the folder.
Tabbed Messages: The ability to have message tabs including the ability to reply, forward and perform all of the usual activities on tabbed messages.
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I’m hosting my email accounts using Google Hosted. I didn’t find any utility to check my multiple email accounts (7). Google’s Gmail Notifier checks only for GMails, not hosted mails. GMail Manager is a Firefox extension that I use to check my GMail account. GMail Manager 5.0 released today supports hosted accounts. I could check all my GMail and GMail hosted accounts from one place now. Good job by GMail Manager developer(s).
Edit: As Krish pointed out, there are 2 important features that are missing in this 5.0 version that were there in the earlier ones.
- Resetting the counter of unread mails as soon as you click on the account.
- Opening the mail in a background tab without taking the focus.
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Posted 26 Jul 2006 — by Arun
Category News
Security firm McAfee warned of a new trojan that installs itself as a Firefox extension on Tuesday, according to Beta News. Once loaded on the infected computer, the trojan begins sending personal information entered in the Web browser to a malicious site. The trojan requires another piece of malware, called “Downloader-AXM” to work. If you have the latest virus scan DAT file, you should be safe.
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Microsoft is planning to distribute Internet Explorer 7 via Windows automatic updates, according to MSDN blog. It’ll be distributed as high priority updates shortly after the final version is released for Windows XP. It is expected to be released in the fourth quarter of this year.
ps: I tried Windows Update through Firefox and it worked!!!. I just tried it today.
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Posted 26 Jul 2006 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu
I bought Zonet ZEW1602 from NewEgg. It’s a pretty good deal ($2.99 after rebate). I installed it in my dual boot desktop. I already have 2 Ethernet ports on that desktop. One is the built-in which I disabled and the other one is the D-Link Ethernet port which is enabled and being used as wired connection to my Belkin wireless router. Once I installed the Zonet ZEW1602, I booted into Windows XP to make sure it works. It did get installed and worked fine. I then booted into Ubuntu Dapper and Ubuntu didn’t recognize the wireless card. I then tried installing network manager and ndiswrapper-utils through Synaptic package manager and rebooted the system. Ubuntu still didn’t recognize the wireless card. I then tried commenting out the references to the ethernet connection in /etc/networ/interfaces file and rebooted the system and it still didn’t recognize the card. I then tried the instructions given in this thread at Ubuntu Forums and that too failed. I then tried what was given in this link. I read somewhere that Zonet’s cards are basically RaLink wireless cards. It didn’t work either. There is only one more option left as given in this link and I’m going to give that a try. If that doesn’t work, then I might move the card to my other desktop running only Windows XP and use wired connection for the Ubuntu Desktop. The problem with installing ndiswrapper as given here is I don’t see my card in ndiswrapper’s drivers list, so I’m not sure how to make it work. Any help would be appreciated.
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