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.

Google currently operates as a search master. As per a common opinion Poll which i conducted, 80 among 100 people might say “google” something and not search it on the web. That means google has a strong hold when compared to others in the market. What else google offers ? It offers you Social networking in more than one way, Wave, buzz, orkut. It gives you picasa as a photo editing and online sharing space. Gmail as a Email portal. Gtalk as the messenger application, Most commonly used by websites is adwords and adsense. If i talk about them all, it will be a long list, lets name some more, imobile, blogger, feedburner, chrome, earth, Sketchup, google maps, latitude & not to forget Youtube.

Now lets think once what google gives out as support. How many products are in beta stage ? Lets talk a bit more about what is going on right now.

Google’s ambitious, new wave of acquisitions may be hampered by the realities of being one of the largest companies on the web. Google already dominates in many areas and, with each new move, competitors and government regulators are getting more concerned and twitchy. The latest example is the AdMob acquisition, which Google announced last year, but that may be challenged by the FTC (the US Federal Trade Commission) likely with monopoly concerns.

Google made waves and headlines when it announced in January that it would stop censoring search results in China even if it meant leaving the country altogether. Since then, though, there has been little information coming from either Google or Chinese officials and some have begun to wonder if the search giant isn’t starting to back down on its initial hard stance.

“We are in active negotiations with the Chinese government,” Eric Schmidt told reporters at a media summit, according to the WSJ. He wouldn’t comment on the status of negotiations, which is to be expected. He did, however, say that there would be news to share soon. “I’m going to use the word ’soon’, which I will not define otherwise,” he said. “There is no specific timetable. Something will happen soon.”

some recent reports published all over the web indicate, google is releasing endless products without testing them, Google criticizes others & threatens them, gives out vibes of monopoly, I wonder whats going to be the future and where google will stand with their OS in market.

“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

“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

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.

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.

Google Chrome 4, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Opera 10 and Apple Safari 4 were all bested by Internet Explorer 8, according to NSS Labs. However, Microsoft underlines that IE6 and IE7 deliver no protection against socially engineered malware, and stresses that users of older versions of Internet Explorer should consider upgrading to IE8 as soon as possible. “Apple Safari 4 caught 29% of live threats, far fewer than Internet Explorer 8,” NSS Labs added. “Overall protection improved greatly from Q3 2009, with Safari providing 0.2% greater protection than Mozilla Firefox 3.5 in the current test. Mozilla Firefox 3.5 caught 29% of live threats to put it in a statistical tie with Safari 4. Both Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 achieved this protection while utilizing the Google Safe Browsing API. Google Chrome 4 caught 17% of live threats, up 9% from the Q3 2009 test. Opera 10 caught less than 1% of the live threats, providing virtually no protection against socially-engineered malware.”
Google Chrome 4, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Opera 10 and Apple Safari 4 were all bested by Internet Explorer 8, according to NSS Labs. However, Microsoft underlines that IE6 and IE7 deliver no protection against socially engineered malware, and stresses that users of older versions of Internet Explorer should consider upgrading to IE8 as soon as possible. “Apple Safari 4 caught 29% of live threats, far fewer than Internet Explorer 8,” NSS Labs added. “Overall protection improved greatly from Q3 2009, with Safari providing 0.2% greater protection than Mozilla Firefox 3.5 in the current test. Mozilla Firefox 3.5 caught 29% of live threats to put it in a statistical tie with Safari 4. Both Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 achieved this protection while utilizing the Google Safe Browsing API. Google Chrome 4 caught 17% of live threats, up 9% from the Q3 2009 test. Opera 10 caught less than 1% of the live threats, providing virtually no protection against socially-engineered malware.”

Source |Softpedia

Another addition to this is a new offer, which gives a free upgrade to Customers who buy Microsoft Office 2007 after or on March 5 2010. eligiblity for this scenario is under:-

The Office 2010 Technology Guarantee will be fulfilled online, via download, at no additional cost.

Technology is always something that consumes time and resources to grow out, either its HDMI or going higher into High Definition or the USB bus that gives us the basic taks related to computing, Technology plays a tricky role with everything. USB 3.0 is something pretty close to that. There were speculations of USB 3.0 to get mainstream sooner, but recently Intel’s representative speaking at CeBIT in germany cleared that USB 3.o will still take a couple of years to evolve and get mainstream. It was cleared that USB 3.0 will become mainstream only till the next version of Windows ( supposedely called Windows 8)(Unconfirmed by Microsoft)**

Microsoft current version of Windows, i.e 7, was released on octuber 22nd 2009, which proved out to be a major success. Windows 8** or the next version of Windows Client OS is yet to be time tabled, but estimates say there is a probable chance of getting a release by 2011 end or in 2012. But Intel’s representative told clearly that USB 3.0 will indeed be supported fully in the next Version of Windows. There are ongoing rumours about Windows 7 to include the support for USB 3.0 in its first service pack that is due in April of this year.

Bit ‘O’ Fact

USB 3.0 is capable of delivering dramatic performance improvements over version 2.0, which maxes out at 480Mbps. By contrast, provided that a computer’s hardware (the type of storage drive and motherboard) play nice with USB 3.0, the technology can, at least in theory, deliver transfer rates of up to 5Gbps. One of the best things about USB 3.0 is the fact that it’s fully compatible with its precursor, version 2.0.

Windows 8** Microsoft added sometime back ” Who says we will call it Windows 8″

When you think about Windows 7, the most successful operating system we’ve ever released in our history. It’s the highest-quality operating system we’ve ever released in our history,” Turner said. “This year they will sell 300-plus million PCs. That’s what the forecast is. You know what, Windows will be on 300 million of those PCs this year and that’s an incredible statement to that particular product and the opportunity that we have to continue to work with customers and end users and consumers, as well as refresh the desktops for enterprises.”

“The PC industry will be overwhelmingly driven by mobile PCs, thanks to strong home growth in both emerging and mature markets,” George Shiffler, research director at Gartner, explained. “Mini-notebooks are again forecast to boost mobile PC growth in 2010, but their contribution is expected to decline noticeably afterward, as they face growing competition from new ultra-low-voltage (ULV) ultraportables and next-generation tablets. Desk-based PC shipment growth will be minimal and limited to emerging markets.”

“We expect mobile PCs to drive 90 percent of PC growth over the next three years,” Shiffler added. “In 2009, mobile PCs accounted for 55 percent of all PC shipments; by 2012, we expect mobile PCs to account for nearly 70 percent of shipments.”

“Today during the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, [Microsoft] Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein announced that Windows 7 has sold 90 million licenses to-date! That’s a lot of Windows 7. We’re humbled and excited that people are responding so positively to Windows 7 – our customers have made it the fastest selling operating system in history,” Brandon LeBlanc, Windows communications manager on the Windows Client Communications Team, revealed.

The number offered by Klein is in line with the statistics made public by Internet metrics company net Applications. Windows 7 is credited with a usage share of 8.92%, up from 5.71% at the end of December 2009. After just four months on the market, Windows 7 owns more than half the market share of Windows Vista, which is down to 16.51%. If the current trends continue, Windows 7 will become the second most used operating system worldwide after Windows XP by mid-2010.

Source | Softpedia

“Peter also had an opportunity to show off some of the great hardware innovation coming from our partners in the PC business. He brought three great PCs on stage to show off: the Sony VAIO X which is so sleek and portable it could fit inside a MacBook Air, the Dell Adamo XPS which is the thinnest PC in the world, and the HP Envy 13 which combines breakthrough industrial design with tons of power. I had a hand in helping to get these PCs to Peter for the conference and it was fun to hear him talk about them on stage. All in all, some great momentum for Windows 7 and some great PCs,” LeBlanc added.