Monthly Archives: December 2009

Microsoft fined $16000 for suing Indian software pirates : weird but justified

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India is a country where anything can happen. I really did mean “anything”.

Software piracy if on fifth gear in India and the main targets are obviously Microsoft products. Microsoft isn’t happy with them at all.

microsoft

Recently it filed a case against the software pirates from Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chandigarh and Mumbai at Delhi for using their software without proper legal permission.

What you think would have happened – Those pirates got fined and are leaving a good life now.

What happened – Microsoft got fined and had to pay $4000 to every one of the defendants of the case i.e  4 defendants X 4000 =  $16,000

Delhi High Court had fined Microsoft because it thought Microsoft was using its cash flow to harass the Indian pirates who had to come all the way from different cities to Delhi, the national capital to defend themselves while the cases could have been solved in the local courts also.

What Microsoft did was not illegal but as per Justice Dhingra’s comment,

When the constitution of India provides equality before law, this equality has to be all pervasive and cannot be allowed to be diluted because of money power or lobbying power,

Now this is called a fair decision.

Search thousands of royalty free images with one click!

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Certain search engines are specialised in video or music search, some are good with information text. If you need to search images, we usually go for google image search or flickr or some image search engines. Have you ever thought of searching on eight major search engines at one go ? Yes, you can do with Cyclops.

cyclops

Tired of searching stock photos on websites ? Desperately searching for the perfect image ? Here comes the beautiful baby Cyclops. Cyclops is a Monster search engine for royalty stock images. It brings the results of the most popular stock sites to one location. Search once. See it all.

search

Just like an ordinary search engine, you have to enter the keyword for finding the stock photos and it gives search results from websites such as Flickr, Shutterstock, BigStockPhoto, Fotolia, stock.xchng, Cutcaster, Photos.com, stockvault.

Cyclops – Homepage

Cyclops is worth a try if you are searching for fresh royalty stock photos.

Try out yourself and leave your comments =)

They blew my Macbook because they thought it was a Bomb

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Israeli Police blew up a Macbook with bullets because they thought it was bomb. Smart reason.

macked-2

A lady was going to Jerusalem and they were stopped at the border for security reasons, asked questions like who was her boyfriend, was he a Arab, Egyptian, Palestinian?

Sometime later when the lady waited and a manager arrived and told her,

I’m sorry but we had to blow up your laptop.

Obviously she was shocked, i mean even i would be. Check out the pictures (BTW it still looks beautiful!)

macked-3

macked

Looking for a perfect Christmas gift? Google has one!

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Google_Gift

From fascinating and artistic youtube videos to creative television adverts, the Google Chrome browser is literally everywhere these days. Google has decided that it will leave no stone unturned in the publicity of the fast and sleek IE-killer and why not, after all its the backbone of the soon to be born Google Chrome OS.

As for the holiday season,the search giant has come up with a new breathtaking site which allows people to give the gift of Chrome.

The Chrome for Christmas site allows users to send greeting cards to their loved ones(or even strangers) with a gift i.e the Google Chrome Pokeball neatly wrapped in artistic designs to be chosen by the sender.

The sender can attach a photo and a video too along with a short message. The receiver gets a link which shows the Google Chrome logo popping out of the gift wrap in a funky way leading to a link to download Google Chrome.

This campaign is definitely avant-garde as far as browser publicity is concerned which itself might give the browser a lot of attention. There is also the plain old,Give the gift of Chrome site which allows users to gift chrome 365-days a year.

So,if you haven’t found the perfect Christmas gift yet, why not give the gift of Chrome to the frustrated IE users?

Links:

Chrome for Christmas

Give Chrome

Google Chrome Download

Poll:

Picture Credit : JohnChow.com

The Google Phone – Nexus One : Features and Design Review

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gPhoneGoogle Employees started tweeting from a new “Google Phone”. Rumors were already around and now its confirmed.  Google Employees all over the world have already got it form Google for testing purposes.

Google confirmed this news too. The best part of it is that this mobile phone would be branded and unlocked by Google and sold all over. This could be the turning point. 

When the internet giant which nearly rules the internet comes to  the mobile market you can hope for some tough competition to the existing brands!

We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.

Well, they aren’t ready to share info about the phone officially, but who cares we still got it. It is rumoured to be named “Nexus one” and I really don’t know what that means.

 

Google Phone tweets

Google Phone tweets

Features

The OS is obviously Android 2.1 and hardware, as I said in the title, is made by HTC (I wonder, didn’t they get any other better company? Just Kidding.)

It’s damn fast as it’s got a “SnapDragon Chip” and graphics seem to be too good on a OLED touchscreen. It’s got a onscreen keyboard! (iPhone, sigh.)

One tweets from a Google employee says, “an iPhone on beautifying steroids”

Maybe this one’s a sexier version of iPhone or something. This Cellphone will be sold online by Google and as i said it’s unlocked, so you will need to buy a carrier separately (This was happening in India since years, but finally Google also does it!)

It’s got a Voice to text feature so no more typing tweets or SMS but speaking it out and getting it down on your phone. I’ll be waiting for this one though it’s been said the phone would be out on mass production in January 2010. Pricing is not fixed but is estimated to be around $100-$200.

Via Mashable , Techcrunch and Engadget.

When your Robotic arm reads your thoughts and acts accordingly

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After a long research of about a month, scientists have managed to create a robotic arm which can be controlled by just the thought of it. During this session of one month the scientists managed to create a cyber electronic arm which can move about in any direction by just thinking about it. This arm was designed for an Italian man who lost his left forearm in a car crash. This arm was successfully attached to his body using electrodes which were implanted in his nerves located in what remained of the damaged arm. This interesting experiment was named LifeHand. This has enabled the man to feel sensations in the artificial limbs.

This is the type of arm that is installed. Though it is not exactly the same

This is the type of arm that is installed. Though it is not exactly the same

During the month that this experiment was conducted, the patient, Pierpaolo Petruzziello learned to wriggle his robotic fingers, make a fist out of them and has also managed to lift things. This is the first time a patient has been able to make complex movements using his mind to control a biomechanical hand through his central nervous system.

Online Version of iTunes : Now that’s streaming music

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lala

iTunes was about a 89 Mb download and eons ago, when i had a 56 KbpS internet speed all i wished was a online version of iTunes because i had to keep my computer switch on overnight and i was sure that it won’t survive (i had Windows Xp with a P4 processor and 512 Mb Ram). 

After acquisition of Lala, a paid online music streaming service which charges 10 cents for unlimited streaming of music on all devices, by Apple brings the idea a bit more towards the side of reality.

What is soon going to follow would kill off the need of downloading a iTunes software and going online completely.

Why, you say? Apple is looking for ways to capture a larger share of the Music distribution market. Also, cloud computing seems to be the future of computing where all your data is stored on clouds (not on actual clouds, i mean cloud servers) so that it can be easily accessed from most devices easily.

10 Cents to stream music from any device is a inexpensive deal and could revolutionize the way we share music, though Lala was present for quite sometime but was restricted to few countries. After joining Apple’s army new developments are likely to follow.

Just think of possibilities. Streaming music on your iPods, iPhones, etc would make it damn easy to do it. Thanks Mashable.

Thanks Yahoo for Twitter Integration : So Early

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Google Got it. Bing Got it. My brother got it. Now Yahoo gets it. Thanks Yahoo so much for the adding a brilliant new feature of Twitter results to Yahoo so early (If you thought Yahoo! did it early, your actually dum. I am being sarcastic, sigh.)

Anyway, let me show you how it works. As we know Google and Bing surely have better backups and investment ready compared to Yahoo and when they included search results they payed Twitter for getting access to status updates on twitter but on Yahoo’s side, Yahoo is completely dependent on free tools (mostly the twitter API itself) for indexing updates.

Yahoo-Twitter-Search

Yahoo with Twitter integrated Search results

The Algorithm is such that it finds relevant tweets matched with the Search and then shows up in the results, but mind it guys it would only appear for the trending topics / hot topics. 

What could be the effects? Perhaps not radical but surely this could help Yahoo a bit since today, more then reading long stories we prefer finishing everything up in 140 characters, but i wonder if it makes a huge difference as Google and Bing who are one the largest search providers have already done it.

All  have for Yahoo is a good luck wish (if it hopes to survive in the market). 

[Picture Credit : Mashable via Yahoo News]

Tweet to your competitors and loose your Job : Vodafone

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If you remember some guys at dominos had got fired for uploading a idiotic (stupid or whatever) on youtube. Wonder if your one tweet could do the work!

TMobileHungary Tweets,

Hungary´s T-Mobile network partly down, software to blame

Which is later followed by another tweet,

There will be an official statement (released) about the network problem. Please be patient!

twitter-vodafone

Then, an employee from Vodafone Hungary replies to TMobileHungary from Vodafone’s official twitter handle (@Vodafone_HU),

OK, give us a ring! ;) RT @tmobilehungary There will be an official statement (released) about the network problem. Please be patient!

Vodafone becomes is damn angry, and stated that the twitterer should be sacked as Vodafone had nothing to do with T-Mobiles Downtime. I felt that the tweet was a real insult to T-Mobile then Vodafone (you got the pun, ha?). Thanks TheNextWeb.

Superb Creative ad for Google Chrome

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GchromeBrowsers wars are yet from over. All are fighting to get a larger market share. The big G (If your not a Geek/Nerd, then Big G means Google)  is also trying it’s luck in the fight with Chrome.

Chrome for Mac was a nice way of capturing a larger market share. Anyway, after the break check out a Creative ad, which surely took a hell lot of time to be made (assumption made on the basis of the beauty of the ad).

[Via Reddit]