Vishal Arya

The Chromium Developer Channel has .deb packages for Debian and its Ubuntu derivative. Users of other systems are fairly much on their own, although Google assures them that unpacking the .deb files by hand “may work” and the final version should — like Google Earth — be available for countless other Linux flavors. The 64-bit version seems to be just a repackaged 32-bit version and first accounts give it a somewhat less than stellar review.

Google warns that installing the .deb packages adds the Google repository so as to extract updates automatically. To avoid this, use sudo touch /etc/defaults/google-chrome to create a dummy file before installing. The German sister publication <link href=”http://www.linux-community.de”>Linux Community</link> has put the 32-bit version through a quick test under Ubuntu 9.04.

Chrome, like its Chromium community version, is not yet feature complete. Supports for plugins such as Java and Flash, print functions and Google Gears are missing. Many dialog windows still have “TODO” content or are altogether empty, such as the Element Inspector. Google is clear about its “developer preview channel” status (”where ideas get tested and sometimes fail”), clearly not meant for Linux end-users.

What really works pretty well is page rendering. We loaded various pages with considerable AJAX dynamic content and they rendered just as well as those with complex stylesheets. The speed was already impressive: Chrome felt noticeably faster than a cutting-edge Firefox on the same computer.

Even though Google mentions that the immature Chrome “may still crash frequently” and to send in crash reports, we couldn’t manage to disquiet it in any way.

source : linuxpromagazine.com

Look up there, folks. That’s the future of Sony’s hopes and dreams in the handheld gaming sector. With just hours to go before the company’s official E3 2009 press event, it looks like the pieces are all coming together. First a UMD-less game release, then a highly credible mole giving the PSP Go a name, and now — live action shots. The images here were sourced from an obviously slipped June 2009 Qore video, and aside from giving us a look at the slider-based system (which, let’s be honest, looks a ton like the questionably successful mylo), we’re also told that it’ll tout 16GB of internal memory, built-in Bluetooth and an undisclosed memory slot. If all goes well, it’ll ship this Fall for a price to be determined, and it’s actually not slated to replace the PSP-3000, as both of ‘em will attempt to live on store shelves harmoniously… at least for awhile. Oh, and don’t worry — we’ll be on hand in LA to bring you all the impressions we can muster early next week

Check out the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC_MQzIUTYU

• 3.8-inch display (resolution is undisclosed)
• 43 percent lighter than the PSP-3000
• 16GB of Flash storage
• Bluetooth built-in; supports handset tethering and BT headsets
• No UMD drive
  
• Memory Stick Micro slot
• New Gran Turismo, Little Big Planet and new Metal Gear Solid (!) on the way
• Full PlayStation Network support (movie and TV rentals / purchases)
• Integration with PlayStation 3 (works the same as the PSP-3000 does)
• Sony views each of its products as “10-year lifecycle products,” so the PSP “needs to live on.”

Sony’s PSP Go Gallery : Here

Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Bing, a new Decision Engine and consumer brand, providing customers with a first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions. Bing is specifically designed to build on the benefits of today’s search engines but begins to move beyond this experience with a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business. The result of this new approach is an important beginning for a new and more powerful kind of search service, which Microsoft is calling a Decision Engine, designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions. The new service, located at http://www.Bing.com, will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, June 3.

The explosive growth of online content has continued unabated, and Bing was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload that has come to characterize many of today’s search experiences. Results from a custom comScore Inc. study across core search engines show that as many as 30 percent of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result. The data also showed that approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or requery on the search results page.

“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

A New Approach to Internet Search

Based on the customer insight that 66 percent of people are using Internet search more frequently to make complex decisions,* Microsoft identified three design goals to guide the development of Bing: deliver great results; deliver a more organized experience; and simplify tasks and provide insight, leading to faster, more confident decisions. The new service, built to go beyond today’s search experience, includes deep innovation on core search areas including entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition and document summarization technology as well as a new user experience model that dynamically adapts to the type of query to provide relevant and intuitive decision-making tools.

* Great search results. Relevant search results are still a top priority for people, yet Microsoft studies show that only one in four search queries deliver a satisfactory result. Bing helps identify relevant search results through features such as Best Match, where the best answer is surfaced and called out; Deep Links, allowing more insight into what resources a particular site has to offer; and Quick Preview, a hover-over window that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the related site’s relevancy. Bing also includes one-click access to information through Instant Answers, designed to provide the sought-after information within the body of the search results page, minimizing the need for additional clicks.
* Organized search experience. More and more customers are regularly spending time with search engines, engaging in complex, multi-query and multi-session searches. Respondents also said an organized search experience would be twice as useful in helping find information and accomplishing tasks faster. Bing includes a number of features that organize search results, including Explore Pane, a dynamically relevant set of navigation and search tools on the left side of the page; Web Groups, which groups results in intuitive ways both on the Explore Pane and in the actual results; and Related Searches and Quick Tabs, which is essentially a table of contents for different categories of search results. Collectively, these and other features in Bing help people navigate their search results, cut through the clutter of search overload and get right down to making important decisions.
* Simplify tasks and provide insight. Microsoft’s research identified shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research as areas in which people wanted more assistance in making key decisions. The current state of Internet search isn’t optimized for these tasks, but the Bing Decision Engine is optimized for these key customer scenarios. For example, while a consumer is using Bing to shop online, the Sentiment Extraction feature scours the Internet for user opinions and expert reviews to help leverage the community of customers as well as product experts in trying to make a buying decision. In Bing Travel, the Rate Key compares the location, price and amenities of multiple hotels and provides a color-coded key of the best values, and the Price Predictor actually helps consumers decide when to buy an airline ticket in order to get the lowest prices.

The new brand portfolio will include the following changes to existing Microsoft programs:
* Microsoft’s mapping platform, Virtual Earth, will now be branded as Bing Maps for Enterprise.
* Technology from Microsoft’s April 2008 acquisition of Farecast is now a central part of Bing Travel.
* Microsoft’s popular cashback program, now dubbed Bing cashback, with more than 850 merchants and more than 17 million products available, will be fully integrated into the Bing Shopping experience.

source : iclarified

1. The canvas element provides a straightforward and powerful way to draw arbitrary graphics on a web page using Javascript. Sample applications demoed at the show include a simple drawing area and a simple game. But to see the real power of the Canvas element, take a look at Mozilla’s BeSpin. Bespin is an extensible code editor with an interface so rich that it’s hard to believe it was written entirely in Javascript and HTML.
2. The video element aims to make it as easy to embed video on a web page as it is to embed images today. No plugins, no mismatched codecs. See for example, this simple video editor running in Safari. And check out the page source for this YouTube demo. (As a special bonus, the video is demonstrating the power of O3D, an open source 3D rendering API for the browser.)
3. The geolocation APIs make location, whether generated via GPS, cell-tower triangulation or wi-fi databases (what Skyhook calls hybrid positioning) available to any HTML 5-compatible browser-based app. At the conference, Google shows off your current location to any Google map, and announces the availability of Google Latitude for the iPhone. (It will be available shortly after Apple releases OS 3.) What’s really impressive about Latitude on the phone is that it’s a web app, with all the platform independence that implies, not a platform-dependent phone application.
4. AppCache and Database make it easy to build offline apps. The killer demo is one that Vic first showed at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco a few months ago: offline gmail on an Android phone. But Vic also shows off a simple “stickies” app running in Safari.

   (I love the language that Vic uses: “You can even store the application itself offline and rehydrate it on demand.”)

5. Web workers is a mechanism for spinning off background threads to do processing that would otherwise slow the browser to a crawl. For a convincing demo, take a look at a web page calculating primes without web workers. As the demo says, “Click ‘Go!’ to hose your browser.” Then check out the version with web workers. Primes start appearing, with no hit to browser performance. Even more impressive is a demo of video motion tracking, using Javascript in the browser.

Australia Davis Cup team unable to face the Indian summer found a excuse behind security concerns and looks like showing racist biase ITF also has failed to suspend the Aussie chicken tennis team from 2010 competition or relegating them from Asia/Oceania Zone.
I also feel extremely disappointed with AITA approach. i guess best thing to do instead of convincing the Aussie team would have been to show a middle finger and got along with usual business.
If the aussie team would stop using the testicles as brains and would start using real brain it would have been good for tennis. just look at how many Aussies are coming to India for vacations, ask any one going back on what they feel about the security condition here.

Leading telecom operator Bharti Airtel, which has about 2.7 million Internet subscribers, Friday launched its Net PC initiative that provides Internet connectivity to users without the need to invest in personal computers (PC).

With Net PC, users can also work on basic computer functions like word documents and presentations through centrally-placed software and hardware.

Airtel has partnered with Indian hardware manufacturer Nivio and global software giant Microsoft for the service.

Available for Rs.7,999, the no-frills PC will offer customers the choice of three Internet plans in a monthly price band of Rs.699-Rs.1,199, which would include Microsoft’s Office Suite software.

“Net PC is part of our strategic intent to remain focused on enhancing the broadband experience for our customers by offering innovative and collaborative products,” said Bharti Airtel’s telemedia services joint president K. Srinivas.

Till now, only the state-owned telecom operators Mahanagar Telecom Nigam and Bharat Sanchar Nigam offered similar products in collaboration with hardware maker Novatium

India seems to be following in China’s footsteps with a recent proposal to censor the internet space. This proposal comes on the heels of the recent proposal by government to censor news channels during emergency situations that eventually failed to come into effect. Though, the TV censorship was to be initiated only during emergency, the internet will be screened even under normal circumstances.

A Central government officer will be assigned to monitor the websites and news portals and block those materials considered as a threat to national security. The draft rules were prepared by the department of information technology. The rules are drafted under the recent amendments to the information technology (IT) Act. Though the act was passed by Parliament last December, it will not come into effect until the various rules under it are finalized.

According to this rule, every State or Central government department will be able to decide if a certain material relating to its jurisdiction is against the norms. If there is a complaint raised against a web host, the designated officer will give out a judgment after looking into the issue. Though, these new measures can harm the freedom of press, there is a small amount relief in a proposal to set up a review committee.

Word of the new iPhone Third Generation, has been floating around for a long time now and we had mentioned that a possible due date could be July of this year i.e. two months from now. Reports are coming in now that a date has apparently been set (not yet confirmed though) that the next gen iPhone will make its debut on 17th July.
A few images are also making rounds showing off the new handsets latest rear panel material. From steel to glossy black and now apparently matt black is the new look. Other rumors are talking about the Apple logo being able to light up like the laptops. Stay Tuned for more on the new iPhone.

The world’s largest retailer, is set to open its first wholesale or cash-and-carry store in India next week and has chosen Amritsar as the location to kick-start the venture, company officials said.

The US-based giant has also decided to call its cash-and-carry venture BestPrice Modern Wholesale to offer retailers bargains that would eventually benefit end consumers, the officials added.

The venture is in collaboration with the Bharti group that has interests in telecom, retail, agro-trade and realty industries. The US giant and Bharti had formed the 50:50 joint venture in 2007 to launch a chain of wholesale stores in India.

Officials said more than dozen such large stores, spread over 50,000 to 100,000 sq ft were planned in the country over the next five years. They said only retailers who have a sales tax number would be served at these stores.

India does not permit foreign equity in multi-brand retailing, estimated to be a $350-billion industry and seen doubling in size by 2015. Only 5 percent of the market is in the organised segment, with mom-and-pop stores accounting for the bulk of the shops.

User photographs can still be found on many social networking sites even after people have deleted them, Cambridge University researchers have said.

They put photos on 16 popular websites - noting the web addresses where the images were stored - and deleted them.The team said it was able to find them on seven sites - including Facebook - using the direct addresses, even after the photos appeared to have gone.Facebook says deleted photos are removed from its servers “immediately”.The Cambridge University researchers said special photo-sharing sites, such as Flickr and Google’s Picasa, did better and Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces removed the photos instantly.

To perform their experiment, the researchers uploaded photos to each of the sites, then deleted them, but kept a note of direct URLs to the photos from the sites’ content delivery networks.When they checked 30 days later, these links continued to work for seven of the sites even though a typical user might think the photos had been removed.

Lazy approach

Joseph Bonneau, one of the PhD students who carried out the study, said: “This demonstrates how social networking sites often take a lazy approach to user privacy, doing what’s simpler rather than what is correct.”It’s imperative to view privacy as a design constraint, not a legal add-on.” But a Facebook spokesman defended the company’s approach saying; “When a user deletes a photograph from Facebook it is removed from our servers immediately.

“However, URLs to photographs may continue to exist on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) after users delete them from Facebook, until they are overwritten.”Overwriting usually happens after a short period of time.” Users of Facebook staged a revolt recently over rules which would have given the site permanent ownership of their data.
source : bbc.co.uk