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Bill Gates a step back from No.1

Bill Gates’ massive fortune of approximately $53 billion wasn’t sufficient to keep the Microsoft co-founder at the top of Forbes’ annual ranking of billionaires worldwide. Gates is now officially the world’s second-richest man, having lost the top position in favor of Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim Helu. Both Gates and Helu have seen their fortunes explode over the past year, as the world started recovering from the financial crisis.According to Forbes, 164 billionaires that lost enough money to be kicked off the list made a comeback over the past year, to over ten-figure fortunes.

Google Launches Apps Marketplace

“The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses,” Chris Vander Mey, product manager for Google Apps Marketplace, wrote. “Once installed to a company’s domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity.

Flash Player 10.1 Will Come to Windows Phone 7

One of the features that Windows Phone 7 OS will lack at launch is Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1, at least this is what Microsoft said back in February at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. However, the upcoming operating system will do taste Adobe’s technology, although it seems that an exact time frame for when that will happen is not available at the moment.

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March 11, 2010 · Filed Under Microsoft, google

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Transformation to Hard drives

The year is 2010, its time some thing undergo changes. Technology has never been at ease, it changes everyday, something new turns up and outdates other. Now The Hard drives as we know them , are about to undergo a major format shift, this format shift will be the biggest in the last 30 years. It is being said that by early 2011 all harddrives will change how we the users store our data on them. The HDD’s will use advanced format to achieve this. This enhancement will help store more data, more effeciently & while conserving power usage. But the problem arises when we think that right now many users are still on Windows XP, who dont plan to migrate soon to Windows 7.

“The technology has changed but that fundamental building block of formatting has not,” said David Burks, a product marketing manager for storage firm Seagate.
By change in technology, it means that there were times when the hard drives were just few megabytes in size, and formatting them with a 512byte block partition made a whole lot sense, but what now ? when people are using 1TB ( 1024 GB) as a standard Drisk for their computing needs. This fine resolution on hard drives is causing a problem,manager said, because of the wasted space associated with each tiny block.Each 512 byte sector has a marker showing where it begins and an area dedicated to storing error correction codes. In addition a tiny gap has to be left between each sector. In large drives this wasted space where data cannot be stored can take up a significant proportion of the drive.

Moving to an advanced format of 4K sectors means about eight times less wasted space but will allow drives to devote twice as much space per block to error correction.

“You can get yourself into a corner where you cannot squeeze much more onto the disk,” said Steve Perkins, a technical consultant for Western Digital.

This shift also allows manufacturers to make more efficient use of the real estate on a hard drive.

“We can put more data on the disk,” he said. “It’s about 7-11% more efficient as a format.”

Source | BBC

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March 11, 2010 · Filed Under Hardware, Microsoft, Other

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Office 2007 32bit & 64 bit : The difference

Make no mistake about it, Office 2010 is also a platform, not just a productivity suite. Customers generally turn to a variety of third-party extensions that build on top of Office. Incompatibility and lack of support in this regard are inherent problems, especially with the ecosystem needing to catch up with 64-bit Office 2010.

“We strongly recommend most users install 32-bit version of Office 2010 on both 32 and 64-bit Operating Systems because currently many common add-ins for Office will not function in the 64-bit edition. The 64-bit installation of Microsoft Office 2010 products will be available for users who commonly use very large documents or data set and need Excel 2010 programs to access greater than 2GB of memory. There may be technical issues with the 64-bit version and in order to install a 64-bit version of Office 2010 product users must have a 64-bit supported operating system on their PC,” Microsoft notes.

Continue Reading | Softpedia

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March 11, 2010 · Filed Under Microsoft

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Windows 7 Shamrocks Theme Pack

Microsoft uses the Windows Personalization Gallery to not only let customers running the latest iteration of the Windows client customize their desktops with unique imagery, The Shamrocks theme brings to desktops a few wallpapers that are bound to resonate with Irish nationals more than with other users of Windows 7. As the theme’s label implies, the content features a lot of green and the shamrock, both symbols of Ireland. Saint Patrick’s Day, also referred to as St. Paddy’s Day or even Paddy’s Day, is an annual celebration of Saint Patrick, without a doubt the most prominent patron saint of the island.

The three-leafed clover theme is available just in time to allow Windows 7 users with Irish blood to personalize their desktops in accordance with the upcoming Saint Patrick’s Day. As all content on the Windows Personalization Gallery, the Windows 7 Shamrocks theme is offered completely free of charge.

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March 9, 2010 · Filed Under Microsoft

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IE8 Proved Better than most browsers

Windows Internet Explorer 8 caught 85% of the live threats, an exceptional score which surpassed the next best browser (Apple Safari 4) by a 56% margin. Internet Explorer 8 improved 4% between the Q3 2009 and Q1 2010 tests, maintaining its leadership, NSS Labs reveals. IE8 blocked 81% of all socially engineered malware in the last quarter of 2009, and 69% in Q1 2009. The percentage growth of course reflects the evolution of the browser itself in terms of the security it is capable of offering users.

IE8 comes with the SmartScreen Filter, a security feature designed to protect customers from web-based attacks. According to statistics from Microsoft, no less than one in 250 downloads is malicious code, and the end user has been tricked into downloading malicious code and infecting the computer. Eric Lawrence, IE program manager, offered an insight into the work that made IE8 the best choice for staying safe while online against socially engineered malware.

“Since we launched IE8 in March 2009, SmartScreen has blocked over 560 million attempts to download malware, recently averaging over 3 million blocks per day! Hosted in datacenters around the world, SmartScreen’s URL Reputation Service (URS) has evaluated over 250 billion URLs to help keep IE8 users safe from malware. Even more impressively, since IE7’s Phishing Filter was introduced in 2005, the URS has processed over 5.7 trillion requests to block malicious web sites. Every day, Microsoft receives around 300 million telemetry reports from IE8 users and processes 4.1 billion URLs looking for malicious websites and files. On the back end, our systems and analysts evaluate over 1 terabyte of binaries every day to help identify sites delivering malware,” Lawrence said.
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March 8, 2010 · Filed Under Microsoft

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