I bought a Mobile Core Duo laptop (Acer Travelmate 8204) 7 months back. Core Duo just came to the market at that time and the performance review was pretty good. I’m using it for the past 7 months and it’s pretty good. I would have preferred an AMD processor, but AMD had not proven itself in the mobile world. Now Intel has released Core 2 Duo and mobile Core 2 Duo. I thought may be I made a mistake by rushing out to buy Core Duo since Core 2 Duo on the desktop kicked AMD FX chips out in performance and I expected the same to happen with the mobile processor also. I thought there would be a huge performance difference between Core 2 Duo and Core Duo (Ofcourse it’s faster than AMD’s mobile Turion X2). According to PC World, Mobile Core 2 Duo’s performance is only slightly better than Core Duo which is a good news to me. Even the maximum performance gain is only 7% which is negligible in the day to day life. Now I don’t have to regret that I bought Core Duo laptop. 
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Google Talk is a free instant messaging service. To use Google Talk, he or she needs to have a GMail account. It’s not true any more. Anyone can now signup for Google talk with your existing email address. You don’t need a GMail account. However some features like chat histories and mail notifications will work only if you have a GMail account. Google has taken a right step in not restricting Google Talk to only GMail users, a path that is different from other IM clients like MSN or Yahoo.
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Ubuntu has released Edgy Eft beta, their next version of Ubuntu Linux. Some of the new features include
New Bootup Splash
Gnome 2.16
Tomboy
Evolution 2.8
Firefox 2.0
Open Office 2.0.4 RC2
Gaim 2.0.3.1 beta
New login screen
and much more.
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IBM and Lenovo announced today that they are recalling 526,000 laptop batteries made by Sony corporation. This follows the earlier recalls from Apple and Dell. Lenovo will offer customers free-of-charge replacement batteries for all recalled batteries.
IBM and Lenovo sold these Sony batteries in systems listed below between February 2005 and September 2006.
- ThinkPad R Series (R51e, R52, R60, R60e)
- ThinkPad T Series (T43, T43p, T60)
- ThinkPad X Series (X60, X60s)
To find out if your laptop is affected, you can use either Lenovo’s automated solution or find the batter number as shown in the picture. You have to remove the battery to check the model number.
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Sharp Corporation of Japan said on Wednesday that they have developed World’s first triple vision LCD panel that allows you to view three different images on one screen, all at the same time. Sharp already had unveiled LCD panel last year allowing you to view two different images.
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Microsoft has released a new beta version (version 1.0.141) of Windows Live Writer. The new beta contains:
- Tagging support – You can see insert tag button on the right side
- Categories are now sorted
- Better startup – much faster than the previous version
- Better style detection
- Insert Hyperlink option in the context menu
- Insert Hyperlink now has option to enter title
They also have Blog This for Firefox and Blog This for Internet Explorer plugins.
Here is the list of plugins available:
Acronyms plugin – This plugin lets you search for an acronym description and insert it the acronym with the description in the blog post.
Event Plugin – Inserts events into a blog post.
Flickr4writer – Flickr4Writer is a plugin that enables interaction with the Flickr(tm) services.
Ink Blog plugin – Ink Blog allows Tablet PC users to Blog in ink directly from Windows Live Writer.
Insert Spaces Emoticons – Allows you to insert a Live Spaces Emoticon into your blog entry.
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lemieuxster has a neat little script to add Netscape News scroller to your blog or web page. Add the following code to your blog or webpage:
<a href=”http://www.lemieuxster.com/netscape/scroller/”></a>
<embed src=”http://www.lemieuxster.com/netscape/scroller/scapebar.swf” wmode=”transparent” quality=”high” bgcolor=”#666666″ name=”Netscape Scroller” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer” align=”middle” height=”300″ width=”195″></embed>
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Posted 27 Sep 2006 — by Arun
Category News
Canadian scientists using laser and infrared scans to produce a 3D image of the painting have suggested that the famous smile on Mona Lisa could be because she was pregnant or she just had a baby. Using the laser and infrared scans allowed details beneath layers of paint to be seen – including a gauzy dress then associated with pregnant or new mothers. The researchers said other details obscured by darkened paint and varnish included the hair originally being in a bun and a slightly different posture, as well as the gauze dress. “This type of gauze dress … was typical of the kind worn in early 16th Century Italy by women who were pregnant or who had just given birth,” said Bruno Mottin of the French Museums’ Center for Research and Restoration. The woman herself has been identified as the wife of Florentine businessman Francesco del Giocondo.
Update: Here is a link to infrared photo of Mona Lisa from NY Times.
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I don’t like the way Microsoft and it’s softwares work, but that shouldn’t stop me from appreciating Windows Live Writer (beta). It’s a pretty neat product from Microsoft, which is a surprise. It’s simple, easy to use with quite a good number of useful features especially for handling images. I’m using this to post my blogs for last few weeks. I really like it. I didn’t see any alternative blogging tool that is as good as Windows Live Writer. What makes me sad is, I didn’t come across any good blogging tool similar to Windows Live Writer, for Linux.
I came across a blogging tool named Bleezer, which is platform independent (available for all platforms including Linux), thanks to Deflexion. Some of the highlights of Bleezer are:
- Works with Windows, OS X, Linux
- Works with many blogging service
- Tags
- Spell Check
- Ping Technorati, weblogs.com, ping-o-matic etc
- Work offline or online
- It’s free
The disadvantages (keeping me from using Bleezer) are, as mentioned in Deflexion:
It doesn’t let you edit the entire HTML source of the blog posting and powered by Bleezer tag at the bottom of each post.
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Posted 25 Sep 2006 — by Arun
Category News
Mozilla’s Mike Connor had told Debian not to use Firefox name and logo in it’s distributions as it violates trademark policy. He wrote that “
Firefox (the name) is equally protected and controlled by the same
trademark policy and legal requirements as the Firefox logo. You're
free to use any other name for the browser bits, but calling the browser
Firefox requires the same approvals as are required for using the logo
and other artwork.".
This applies to other Linux distributions also unless they get the approval from the
Mozilla organization. I'm not good at the ins and outs of trademarking logos and
names, so I'm not sure if it's good or bad news for open source community.
I do feel that it's a bad news for Linux distributions.
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