Microsoft promised to extend XP support!

This is amazing news i read! Microsoft said, that they will support Windows XP upto 2014.And they will provide patches and hot fixes for XP for support upto April 2014.

May be this is because of lower acceptance of windows vista OR they have fear of lossing on windows users? Whatever it is, but this is good move by them for corporates. Many corporates are still using windows XP and not gonna upgrade their hardware for vista.

Microsoft senior VP Bill Veghte said,

"Our ongoing support for Windows XP is the result of our recognition that people keep their Windows-based PCs for many years,"

So obviously,as we have discussed before that if MS will stop XP support,then all corporates will be on linux? And may be some MS guy had read that :D? May be,but this gonna help lazy corporates who don't want to upgrade ;).

More @ InformationWeek

MS Office 2008 - Mac 12.1.1 Update

This contains several improvements to enhance stability and performance. For more information about this update, please visit the Microsoft Web site.

Improvements:

* Stability is improved.
* This update fixes an issue that causes Office 2008 applications to exit unexpectedly when you open or use Office 2008 applications.
* Dates in a chart are displayed correctly in Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac and in Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 for Mac.

This update fixes an issue that causes the dates in a chart to change unexpectedly when you open a Word 2008 document or a PowerPoint 2008 presentation that contains a chart.

Applies to: Office 2008, Office 2008 Home and Student Edition, Office 2008 Special Media Edition, Word 2008, Excel 2008, PowerPoint 2008, Entourage 2008. (more at source)

Download

doPDF 6.1.265

Changes:

* New: doPDF now has an "Always use this folder" option. When checked, doPDF will save the PDF to the specified location each time a PDF is created.
* Update: When PDF creation fails, doPDF now returns an "Error creating PDF file: " message
* Fix: Corrected a crash with Microsoft Outlook 2007 printing under Vista (does not create ActivateContext anymore, uses existing)
* Fix: Corrected interaction with TransparentBlt and StrecthDIBits

doPDF 6.1.265

Nokia buys rest of Symbian - code will be open source

This will be a big move i think.And may be it can shake the mobile world?Yeah, but we can't guess that much. But this is something of interest for open source peoplse. If nokia buys and may be they make the code Open. Think what can be the development? Lets see what happens, but for sure this will bring new things to us :).

Nokia on Tuesday announced it plans to acquire all of Symbian, which develops an operating system for mobile phones. The Finnish phone giant currently owns about 48 percent and will pay €264 million ($410 million) for the rest. It has received thumbs up from Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic Mobile Communications, and Siemens, which represents about 91 percent of the Symbian shares subject to the offer, according to a statement from Nokia.

Samsung Electronics, a partial stakeholder in Symbian, hasn't commented yet, but Nokia said it expects the company to agree to the sale. The deal doesn't come as a surprise to Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight.

"Nokia paid out more than $250 million in Symbian license fees last year, so it makes commercial sense to buy Symbian for about $410 million, rather than keep paying what is effectively a subsidy to the other shareholders,"

Blaber wrote in a company blog.

Infoworld

Livestation - NEW beta 1.0.76.7

Livestation is a free software application that provides a range of live news television channels and radio stations that can be received on a computer anywhere with a basic broadband connection. You can watch television on your desktop, or on your laptop, at home, at work, on the move, or in a hotel room, provided you have a broadband internet connection or wireless access.

Livestation allows you to receive live TV and radio news from the world’s leading broadcasters on your PC, via a multi-channel interactive application on the desktop giving you a unique window on the world’s news. You can watch Livestation full screen or minimised to fit in the corner of your screen, enabling you to carry on with other tasks while also keeping an eye on the news. You can flick between channels, just as you would on your TV set.

new in Livestation 1.0.76.7:

- Personalise your player with your own channels(stream bookmarks).
- Bookmark your own channels, tag them, search for them
- Watch your own channels in Livestation.
- Twitter integration [full changelog]

LiveStation.com

SmartCode VNC Manager 4.0.13.0

SmartCode VNC Manager is a powerful remote administration and monitoring software application for both the business and home network environments. It is typically used for remote network management, remote system administration and in helpdesk environments. The application allows you to take remote control of any computer running VNC, Windows Terminal Servers, or Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.

Key Features:

* Connectivity
o Integrated VNC viewer with SSH tunneling, MSRC4 DSM plug-in, UltraVNC Repeater, SOCKS5 and HTTP proxies support.
o Integrated RDP viewer with SSH tunneling support.
o Integrated Virtual Machine Remote Control Client with SSH tunneling support.

* Computer Management
o Service, Printer, Share and Event Log managers allow you to simultaneously manage several computers using a single window.
o Computer Domain/Workgroup Membership Manager, Remote Task Manager, Installed Software Manager, Remote Exec, Remote Registry Editor, and "Show who is logged on" features.
o Many more..

* VNC Management
o VNC Deployment and VNC Password Reset Wizard (with support for UltraVNC 1.0.4).
o VNC Thumbnail View
o Many more..

* Terminal Server Management
o Terminal Services manager.

s-code.com

Dell is always Hell - charging to downgrade to XP!

I had never liked dell configurations for desktops specifically.I prefer assembled ones.And for laptop, i suggest HP/IBM.

But this is something different weird thing friends. Dell has announced that it will stop selling new computers with Windows XP from now on, unless buyers spend an extra $50 to downgrade their operating system!

What is this?I mean this is something like buying some gas for your car and you will be charged for cleaning and air feeling!I think dell thinks that people will not take vista and they will get benefit. And yeah, sure if people will want XP then dell gets some more bucks on each purchase!

I suggest you,first, don't purchase dell :D. And if you, then take it as it is. And install yourself Windows XP you owning at home.So no need to pay extra $50.

As Microsoft said,

"Last year you told us you weren't quite ready to say goodbye to Windows XP. We listened. That's why we delayed our plan to stop selling it until June 30, 2008."

,dell planned to get money from this also.So clever. :)

Windows XP Future | vnunet

10 must have addons for Firefox 3

"Shall i tell you a secret? Firefox 3 is officially released. "

Well if I am to tell you that then for sure i would recieve 3 million thrashes around the net. FireFox 3 is on a roller coaster ride with already 3 million downloads on its very first day of release. Isnt that great, I love it, everything open source. The best there was, the best there is and the best there sure will be.

Well it is no secret that Firefox 3 is release at least Techlads can help you how to gear up with useful Firefox 3 addons.
Here's a must have list.

gmail Notifier : Notifies you about new mail you receive with little snippets and counts.

firebug : A must have for web developers.

yoono : I would call it a bookmark king.

noscript : Control all those nuisance scripts at your finger tips.

fasterfox : Boost your already speedy firefox with more raw speed.

adblock Plus : Stupid ads beware - here i come.

fast Dial : Thumbnails like opera. How much can you ask.

pDF Download : Control Pdf. Decide whether you wanna view or download those Pdfs.

uRL Fixer : Automatically correct those typing mistakes while you type the urls.

webMail Notifier : If you thought gmail notifier was cool try this one.

Hope this helps you. Moreover if you find any cool addons that you liked please free to mention it here. Enough is enough and its time for a change. Lets go for open source.

Go-OO 2.4.1.5

Go-OO is a fork of OpenOffice that has quite a few impressive features which really ought to be in official OO, but for some reason or another aren't, such as support for OpenXML, better Microsoft Binary support, Excel VBA macros, Visio diagrams and Word Perfect Graphics support. It also boasts significantly better start times -- at least on our poorly equipped test machine.

- Better interoperability
Compared with up-stream OO.o, it has better Microsoft binary file support (with eg. fields support), and it will import WordPerfect graphics beautifully. If you are reliant on Excel VBA macros - then Go-oo offers the best macro fidelity too. If you expect your spreadsheets to calculate compatibly, or you get embedded Visio diagrams in your documents, you'll want Go-oo.

- Better functionality
Go-oo's user interface is more familiar, with lots of small pieces of polish. We have built-in (working) multimedia integration on Linux, a beautiful solver component, and your Chinese should look sane. We also integrate with your system better by default: eg. enabling native file-selectors on Linux.

- A Faster application
From first-time startup, where we sort I/O to reduce seek cost, to a highly optimised second start application and a systray quick-starter on Linux we are faster. We use less memory than up-stream, we link faster, use better system allocators, and don't waste so much time & memory in the registry. Go-oo performance is hard to beat.

Go-OO Home Page

Videolan 0.8.6h

What's New in VideoLAN 0.8.6h:

This is a bugfix release. VLC media player 0.8.6g (a source code release) and earlier versions suffer from security vulnerabilities in the GnuTLS, libgcrypt and libxml2 libraries.

VLC media player 0.8.6f and earlier versions suffer from security vulnerabilities in the Mozilla and ActiveX plugins, in the libpng, libid3tag, libvorbis libraries and in the Speex codec.

Technical details are available in security advisories. This update also includes reliability improvements in multiple modules. More information can be found in the release notes for 0.8.6g and 0.8.6h.

Videolan 0.8.6h

Less updates last week...

Hi friends, i am really very sorry for not updating my blog last week. It is because i was on tour and not able to do blogging. Now onwards, i will try to keep posting new things.

TechLads.

Don't use safari on windows: Research says

We all know about safari on windows since the last release of it. Many articles has been written on that and apple has done patches also. But still something remains :). Read this, and you will surely not use safari on windows.

A researcher has created a proof-of-concept site that graphically demonstrates the risk Windows users face when using Apple's Safari browser. Microsoft's security team already warned that a "blended threat" was so serious that Windows users should curtail their use of Safari until a security patch is available. Blog post from researcher Liu Die Yu makes it clear the warning was by no means overstated.

Clicking on this link with Safari using default settings automatically downloads a booby-trapped file onto a Windows user's desktop with no prompting. The next time the user opens Internet Explorer, the force-fed file automatically causes the notepad.exe application to launch and open a non-existent file. Of course, miscreants could choose far more nefarious code.

When informed that its browser downloads files with no prompting, Apple said it may get around to changing this behavior at some point. In other words, this is no big deal from a security perspective, so let's all move on.

The Register

Silverlight 2 Beta 2

Apparently entering thus far unannounced, Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is available for download. Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

Version 2 Beta 2 adds several major new features, including:

* Improved Template Model
* Including controls in the runtime instead of packaged in the app package
* Upload support
* Duplex communication
* Silverlight DRM streaming content

ReleaseNotes | Download Silverlight

doPDF 6.0.262

doPDF is a free PDF converter for both personal and commercial use. Using doPDF you can create PDF files by selecting the "Print" command from virtually any application. With one click you can convert your Microsoft Excel, Word or PowerPoint documents or your emails and favorite web sites to PDF files.

Main changes in 6.0.262:

* Fixed: Some CambriaMath characters were not converted well
* The Path variable (in Environment Variable) changed type to REG_SZ under certain circumstances, now it's not modified by the installer anymore
* Temporary PDF files and logs are not stored in C:\Windows\Temp anymore, but in the application data folder
* Other bug fixes

Home Page | Download doPDF

Throw it away: Virgin and BPI oposite to illegal downloaders

Virgin Media and the British Phonographic Institute (BPI) are to send warning letters to customers they believe are downloading or distributing music illegally. The announcement represents the first such public deal between the BPI and an ISP.

The pair hope that the new campaign will avoid users risking disconnection and possible legal action.

"Virgin Media's fibre optic broadband is a great platform for people who want to download lots of music,"

said Virgin Media in a statement.

"But we want them to do so without infringing the rights of musicians and music companies."

Customers whose accounts appear to have been used to distribute music in breach of copyright will receive "informative letters" from Virgin Media and the BPI.

What's this? I mean no one is free? This is too much. I mean all the artists and makers of movies and music are already getting much more then they need. They are 'they' because of people like them. People like them because maximum people watch or here them, out of them many are using pirated copies but it makes them more fans. They say they loss money, but i think they got popular with piracy. What you think? If Virgin media is doing this, then what you could download you can understand ;). So better don't use it, throw away it and take some another connection if possible which is not having such crappy rules about how your should use the network after paying much money to keep their mouth shut!

I think all media must be free to public once its out of theaters or published. If they don't like piracy, don't buy bulk pricey expensive DVDs,CDs etc. They made by us, can be fallen by us!

Wha do you think?

More on virgin @ vnunet

Microsoft Videos BETA: A Silverlight Promotion?

Microsoft Videos lets us explore and watch Microsoft's collection of online video. The whole experience is built using Microsoft Silverlight platform. The site is a collection of all types of Microsoft videos which includes demos, advertisements, tutorials, press releases, Microsoft Research videos etc. We can scan through Quick Picks for the latest videos, or enter a search for a particular video and we can also choose from one of the given Video Categories.

I have checked the site. It seems quite good for developers who want to lear new MS technologies using video tutorials. Ans think MS is giving it free is a big zing! :) But see the screenshot i have attached. On homepage, it will ask to install Silverlight. Again MS is doing a promotion of silverlight as i think :). But though, nice to check if you need something.

Microsoft Videos BETA

Firefox tweaking for Broadband

By default, Firefox is optimized for dial up connection. You can change the browser settings so that it can be used to browse with DSL or cable or other broadband links. In order to change the settings, first you need to edit config file. Type about:config in the address bar and press enter. Then enter network.http in the filter field and enter the following changes.

1. Double click on ‘network.http.pipelining’ and set the value to true.
2. Double click on 'network.http.pipelining.maxrequests’ and in the dialog box enter a higher value than the default value 4. 15 is an ideal value.
3. Double click on ‘network.http.proxy.pipelining’ and set the value to true.
4. Right click on the page and select New->Integer. Enter nglayout.initialpaint.delay and then click ok. Set the integer value of this to 0 and click ok.
   

From NirmalTV

Adobe Acrobat 9

Share your ideas
Use Acrobat 9 to create polished PDF files, present multiple documents in a PDF Portfolio, and even add multimedia. And all in a single file.

Control your work
Use Acrobat 9 to apply passwords, set permissions, and permanently remove sensitive information — so you can feel confident your work is safe.

Work better with everyone
With Acrobat 9, your entire team can view and respond as comments are being made — streamlining your reviews and approvals.

Simplify form creation
With just a few clicks, you can create a form that virtually anyone can fill out and save electronically.

Adobe Acrobat 9

Sun wants Open Storage...

Sun Microsystems wants to nudge storage toward a more open framework while helping the industry to do more with flash disk drives than merely replace spinning hard drives. Sun, which traditionally has been the least successful of the IT industry's major system players to attach storage sales to its server sales, feels that storage vendors have followed a proprietary model for too long, said Graham Lovell, senior director of open storage and networking for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor.

"Storage is very closed today,We want to differentiate with a paradigm that is much more open going forward"

Lovell said. For Sun, that means taking advantage of its commitment to open source, including its OpenSolaris and its ZFS storage operating system, Lovell said. Sun made its OpenSolaris operating system available as a free download early last month.

CRN

Adobe Acrobat is now Online

Yes, this is true. Now Adobe also launched online word processor,file storage and sharing with newly Flash-enabled Acrobat 9.

Adobe looks more confident with their Acrobat reader playing movies now in PDFs!

The free Acrobat.com beta includes the Buzzword word processor. Its ConnectNow Web conferencing and desktop sharing tool enables chatting via text, video, and voice. The hosted services invite file storage and sharing with the capability to convert up to five documents to PDF.

It has many features which seems quite attractive like virtual meeting rooms to share documents,security of data,conversion of MOV and WMV files to Flash content which can be embedded within PDFs alongside audio content and even 3D models,drag and drop content etc.

For detailed article news.com | Acrobat.com Beta

MS Office Word 2007 Opened - Article Authoring Add-in

As we discussed some days before, MS has added add-in to convert word doc to XML format used by the National Library of Medicine.

This Beta 1 release of the Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 provides authors of scientific articles with the ability to read and write files from Word 2007 into the XML format used by the National Library of Medicine for archiving articles in the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, PubMed Central.

This Beta 1 release is targeted at the staff of scientific and technical journals, Information Repositories, and early adopters within the scholarly authoring community, as well as developers of publishing solutions and workflows.

Download

IETester - Test Your Site

IETester is a free web browser specifically designed for testing web sites in Internet Explorer including IE 8 beta, IE 7, IE 6, IE 5.5 on both XP and Vista.

Like any web browser, IETester has the usual forward and back buttons, refresh, stop, home, and favorite buttons, but it also has a special feature that allows you to launch new tabs which render the web site in different versions of IE. With IE8's public beta just around the corner, web site owners need to verify that their sites are going to display properly in the new browser, which runs in standards-compliant mode by default.

More @ Ajaxian |IETester Homepage

Gmail with Thunderbird - Just 2 minutes

This Saturday i was trying to set up an email client for my gmail account. First i laid my hands on Microsoft Outlook. It took nearly 30 mins to setup the same. Then i thought why to go for Outlook when i have open-source cross-platform way of doing it. Yes you got that right - Thunderbird.

In this tutorial i would show you how to setup ur gmail account so that its up and running in ThunderBird.

First things first. Enable IMAP in Gmail. For this you have to follow the following steps.
Sign in to you gmail account.
Click on the settings from the top.
Click on Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Select Enable IMAP radio button.
Click on save changes.
There you go, first part is done.

Now for the second part setting up the client, its too easy.
Download Thunderbird.
Run Setup.

After installation, run Thunderbird.
As it is the first time it will show you with below dialog box.

Select Gmail and proceed to next dialog box.
Enter you name and email Id.

There you are, Done!! You have configured gmail with ThunderBird Client. Just 2 minutes !!!