The Apple Lounge give to you a iPhone

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[Italian version]

Internet to Fail by 2010?

So it looks like we broadband users are quickly putting a strain on the multiple-decade old system we call the Internet. As we download videos, music, podcasts, and other multimedia, we are using up more and more resources. This has lead some people to wonder if the Internet could eventually break down from the strain.

From USA Today:

The Web will start to seem pokey as early as 2010, as use of interactive and video-intensive services overwhelms local cable, phone and wireless Internet providers, a study by business technology analysts Nemertes Research has found.

“Users will experience a slow, subtle degradation, so it’s back to the bad old days of dial-up,” says Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson. “The cool stuff that you’ll want to do will be such a pain in the rear that you won’t do it.”

I am pretty sure we have nothing to worry about as countries and business begin to upgrade the systems we use every day. New fiber optic cable is being run, new servers are being put in place, and other technologies to improve the Internet are being created.

What do you think? Will the Internet begin to slow as we continue to increase our high bandwidth activities, or will it continue to evolve to fit our needs as it always has?

[via forevergeek]

High Quality Videos Coming to YouTube Soon

Speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference Youtube Co-founder Steve Chen said that Youtube will at some time in future stream high quality videos. Although YouTube’s goal, he said, is to make the site’s vast library of content available to everyone, and that requires a fairly low-bitrate stream, the service is testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer’s Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if they want it.

Steve Chen said that the high-quality streams will be available in the next months, but only for some of the videos. This is probably the reason why YouTube’s bulk uploader increased the size limit for a video from 100 MB to 1 GB.

YouTube probably has the lowest quality videos on the Web today thanks to the Flash 7 Technology. According to Wikipedia,

“YouTube’s video playback technology is based on Macromedia’s Flash Player 7 and uses the Sorenson Spark H.263 video codec. (…) [The video] has pixel dimensions of 320 by 240 and runs at 25 frames per second. The maximum data rate is 300kbit/s.”

Steve Chen also confirmed that in YouTube’s internal archive, all video is stored at the native resolution in which it was uploaded it. However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with — 320 x 240. Streaming them in high-quality mode isn’t going to help much. So expect the rollout of High Quality Videos to be pretty slow from Youtube since the existing setup is working well for them, so this is just an experiment.

[via dailyApps]

PS3 Celebrates its First Birthday

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) today celebrates the first birthday of its PLAYSTATION 3. Launched one year ago in North America, PS3 has revolutionized the industry with its Cell Broadband Engine technology which gives the system tremendous computational power; Blu-ray Disc capabilities which provides state-of-the art graphics and unrivaled storage capacity; and free access to PLAYSTATION Network where PS3 users can experience online gaming, connect with other PS3 users as well as download games, movies and other content from the PLAYSTATION Store.
In its first year, more than 200 software titles have been released for PS3 and more than 60 million pieces of content have been downloaded from PLAYSTATION Network worldwide. Also, through the continued support of and dialogue with PS3 users, remarkable hardware advancements and features have been added to the system through firmware updates making it the most advanced computer entertainment system on the market today.
When we designed PS3 our goal was to introduce a system so technically advanced that it could stand the test of time and could take the industry in a whole new direction, which for PS3 was high-definition entertainment said Jack Tretton, President and CEO of SCEA. While we're excited by the progress we've made this first year, we know that like our other platforms, the best is still yet to come, especially given our new hardware and software line-up, and that PS3 will continue to take the industry to new heights for years to come. PS3 is the first gaming system to provide a disc capacity of 50GB thanks to its Blu-ray Disc functionality. Current PS3 first party games are currently in the 20GB range, well north of the threshold of HD-DVD or DVD, allowing for unmatched potential for games, movies and other media.

[via sohood.com]

Firefox 3 Beta Answers Some Questions, Raises Others

CRN Test Center downloaded Firefox 3 Beta 1 from Mozilla for a peek to get an idea of what users can expect when Firefox 3 is officially launched. Since this is a beta, the browser is intended for testing purposes only. While no one expects the browser to be production-ready now, if history is any guide, the likelihood of users going ahead and upgrading increases the longer the product stays in beta.

The beta was downloaded onto a Compaq desktop with AMD (NYSE:AMD) Athlon processor, a five-year old Dell (NSDQ:Dell) Inspiron notebook, and a three-year-old IBM (NYSE:IBM) Thinkpad T42 laptop. All three machines run Windows XP. Installation was painless and took less than five minutes on all machines. Bookmarks and profiles from both Firefox and from Internet Explorer migrated seamlessly. However, the browser didn't work well on all hardware configurations.

The Dell Inspiron originally had Firefox 1 installed instead of Firefox 2 because the memory leaks were so severe that the newer browser was practically unusable. Firefox 3 Beta 1 didn't seem to have any of the memory problems. It ran a little slowly, but that was a reflection on the hardware's age and not on the beta. Firefox 2 works just fine on the Thinkpad, but the beta was very sluggish and had moments of unresponsiveness. This could be an issue in the beta or in interoperability with other third-party applications. Hopefully, the uneven experience across different hardware will be resolved by the time the software comes out of beta.

Overall, Firefox 3 looks identical to Firefox 2. The visual differences between the two are fairly minor " most of the changes seem to be under the hood. Some menu options have been removed entirely, or renamed. For example, Text Size in Firefox 2 under View is now called Zoom under Firefox 3. Firefox 3 comes with a DOM inspector, which is very helpful for developers looking at scripts.

READ MORE...

[via crn]

Orange to sell 49 eur/month iPhone contract-paper

PARIS, Nov 23 (Reuters) - French telecoms operator Orange will offer a two-year service contract for a minimum of 1,176 euros ($1,754) with the Apple (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) iPhone, which it will start selling in France on Wednesday evening, Les Echos said.

The newspaper said on Friday Orange had briefly leaked details of its terms of sale for the music-playing, Internet-browsing device on its Website.

France Telecom (FTE.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) unit Orange declined to comment.

Apple sold 1.1 million iPhones in the United States between the end of June, when it first went on sale, and the end of September, beating analysts' forecasts. Thousands of customers queued for days to be among the first to buy one.

The company aims to sell 10 million of the devices by the end of 2008, representing about 1 percent of the total mobile phone market, but industry watchers are unanimous that the iPhone's impact is far greater than its market share suggests.

As well as raising the bar for other handset makers with the iPhone's many media features, Apple has broken with tradition by making exclusive deals with one carrier in each country, beginning with AT&T (T.N: Quote, Profile, Research) in the United States.

In Germany, Apple's exclusive sales partner T-Mobile (DTEGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research) was forced by a court this week to offer customers iPhones that are not locked to the T-Mobile network.

But the 999 euro price at which it will offer unlocked phones, compared with 399 euros with a contract, makes the move almost meaningless.

In France, Orange will also offer the iPhone without a service contract but Les Echos said the price, like in Germany, would be significantly higher. Orange has said the starting price with a contract will be 399 euros.  Continued...

[via Reuters]

1,400 Wii consoles sold in ten minutes on Amazon

It's the Wii console's second Christmas out and there a strong sense of déjà vu in reports that talk of internet-breaking sales as punters go mental for Nintendo's console.
Amazon apparently sold 1,400 consoles in just ten minutes, when stock was renewed last week. A similar picture is painted at retailers across the country, as the widely sold-out Wii becomes harder to find with every passing day.
The craze has predictably pushed up prices of the console - some are selling on eBay and Amazon (second hand) for over £300. Just as Reggie said would be the case, there just aren't enough consoles for everyone.

It's not that Nintendo isn't making many - on the contrary the company is said to be pumping out 1.8 million units a month. That's not enough to satisfy demand, but retailers are pretty happy about it.
The chief executive of Woolworths, Trevor Bish-Jones, told the Telegraph: "There is a steady flow of Wiis into the country between now and Christmas. It will not be enough to meet all consumer demand but is sufficient for retailers to enjoy good levels of sales in the run-up to Christmas."
We at CVG could only find select shops that still had Wii consoles in stock, and that was because they were bundling the console with fives games (that you probably don't want) for £400. No thanks.

[via computerandvideogames]

iDesktop.tv the new YouTube?

So what is iDesktop.tv?

iDesktop.tv is an incredibly cool dynamic web 2.0 application, with a terrific modern design, for searching, watching and downloading videos from the richest online video archive, YouTube.
This is basically adding functionality and experience to what "should be" there. The possibilities of the site reach far beyond that. It gives you the chance to create your own environment for watching video clips, saving them and sharing them with friends.

What makes iDesktop.tv unique?

Designing iDesktop.tv we followed one primary idea - to bring normal desktop application experience to the browser - windows that can be dragged, resized, minimized in a tray, drag'n'drop of videos between players and results, standard menus - all with one goal - to make the richest web application for viewing and managing video content! You will be amazed by the flexibility and fabulous design of the website. It is user friendly and easy to navigate but also has great functionality.

Hack Attack : Get Windows XP SP3 Through Windows Update

Well If you have read my previous Hack Attack on How you can download Windows Vista SP1 through a Hack and it worked for you then here is another Hack that will allow you to download Windows XP SP3 RC1 directly from Microsoft. Windows XP SP3 will be the final service pack that we will see for the World’s biggest Operating System from Microsoft. SP3 will bring a host of bug fixes and some new features borrowed from Vista.

Well here is how you can download SP3 straight from Microsoft. Follow the instructions carefully and you’ll be running Windows XP SP3 in no time. Grab yourself a cup of Coffee as you do this..

Don’t fret too much, this won’t take much time. I can assure you that..

• Download this file ( WindowsXPSP3Hack.cmd ). Once you have downloaded the file, login as administrator and run the file by double clicking it. Wait for the Confirmation Message on screen.
• The Above file adds a few entries to the Windows Registry that makes Microsoft think that you are a part of the Private beta program.
• Check for new updates on Windows Update. You should now see Windows XP SP3 listed in the available updates.
• Download and install it. Reboot whenever necessary.

Please note this hack is the exact way Microsoft expects its beta testers to try Windows XP SP3 out, so you don’t have to worry too much about Microsoft catching hold of you.

I tried this on Windows XP Machine and this hack worked like a charm. Let me know if this works for you.. If you can’t wait for Microsoft to release SP3 officially then this hack is for you.

Spread the word around, so that many more people can download the 3rd Service Pack.

[via dailyapps]

How to reduce the memory usage in Firefox?

Firefox 2.0 since its release had the niggling memory leak and no matter how many updates have been out to address this issue it still has that retard issue. A standard Firefox install without any extensions consumes around 80MB but soon after you add a few extensions you can see a noticeable drop in the performance. There are many guides out over the internet but i have made my own version that seems to work. It gono be a pretty comprehensive guide so you have a stick a little longer to learn the tricks.

First of all make sure you have the latest version of Firefox, presently 2.0.0.7. If you don’t have which i doubt. You can download using the link below, if you are kind enough grab my referral link.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

1. Extension and themes the main cause of memory leaks.

A standard install of Firefox doesn’t seems to show any memory leak issues. But after installing few extensions it seems to show the memory leak issues. Basically this issue occurs due to buggy, bloatware extensions. Also if you overloaded your Firefox with extensions, you can expect high memory usage. Same goes for themes, don’t install too many themes. To minimizes memory issues try testing each plugin one by one for few hours and check over their memory signature. As a result you can always find out the buggy ones and help yourself minimizing the high memory usage. You can even check this comprehensive list of buggy extensions and find out if one of your extension belongs here. Always keep your extensions updated this is another way to cope with the issue.

2) Start Firefox in Safe Mode

If one of your extensions is not in that list, boot Firefox into Safe Mode to disable all extensions and themes. You can do this by going to Start > Run, and entering:

firefox -safe-mode

A similiar looking box will appear .Now check Disable all add-ons
now click on Continue in Safe Mode. Now fire up your Windows task manager and compare the memory usage before and after disabling the extensions. Normally disabling extensions only drops of couples of MB of ram. But if you find some memory spikes this surely indicates some problems of either of the extensions or themes installed.

3) Plugins:

Another memory hogger are the plugins that are needed for open special media or application within Firefox, like Java chat, PDF reader, WMV, Quicktime etc. Here are some links from MozillaZine that offers some basic solutions to plugin related issues.

• Reducing Adobe Reader memory usage
• Shockwave memory usage
• Flash memory usage
• Java memory usage

4) Clear your Download History

[via thinktechno]

(Read here the full guide)

51 Icones for your Rss Feed!

Download Here

Testers give iPhone virtual keyboard the thumbs down

The virtual Qwerty keyboard on Apple's iPhone allows users to enter text as quickly as they would on another handset's physical keyboard, but they'll make rather more mistakes in the process.

That's the conclusion drawn by a Chicago usability consultancy after watching 60 punters tap away on a variety of handsets. Twenty of them used iPhones, another 20 used full-size BlackBerries, and 20 more were given Samsung E300 numeric pad-only phones to try.

Each triallist was told to type out six fixed-length text messages, while iPhone users also had to enter two sentences containing all the English letters, along with a block of text that contains the letters in the frequencies they most commonly appear in in written work.

The text messages were constructed to prevent the quirks of numeric-pad text entry favouring or hindering users. Curiously, the use of predictive text was not part of the test.

Accordingly to the surveyor, User Centric, the BlackBerry users punched out their missives as quickly as the iPhone users did. However, the latter group made, on average, 5.6 text-entry errors per message, to the BlackBerry team's 2.1 errors per message. They were just ahead of the Samsung group, who scored 2.4 errors per message.

As a control, User Centric also tried non-iPhone owners out on handsets they were unfamiliar with, each individual typing out six more fixed-length messages. People who've primarily used numeric pads for texting made fewer mistakes when they moved on to a physical Qwerty pad than they did on the iPhone's touchsensitive screen. And they were faster on the hard keyboard than the virtual one.

Numeric-pad phone owners made an average of 5.4 errors per message on the iPhone, 1.2 errors per message on the physical Qwerty phone and 1.4 errors per message on their own phone.

"Participants also indicated a preference for hard-key Qwerty phones when texting," said User Centric's Jen Allen.

[via reghardware | read more]

Blogger Template - Andreas02 Theme

Title: Andreas02
Original design by Andreas Viklund
Booted by BlogCrowd
Platform: Blogger, Blogspot
Filetype: xml

Download Here

K2 Blogger Beta Template

 

Title: K2 Blogger
Original design by Michael Heilemann, Chris J. Davis, Safirul Alredha
Booted by BlogCrowds
Platform: Blogger, Blogspot
Filetype: xml

 

Download Here

(open file with Wordpad and not Notepad)

Blogger Template - Take me to the sky

 

Title: Take me to the sky
Author: detonatedlove
Platform: Blogger, Blogspot
Filetype: xml

Download Here

Blogger Template- Kubrick

 

Title: Kubrick

Original design by Michael Heilemann
Booted by Kaie’s Blog
Platform: Blogger, Blogspot
Filetype: xml

Download Here

Bogger Template - BloggerO K2 Clone

 

Title: BloggerO K2 Clone
Author: Bloggero
Platform: Blogger, Blogspot
Filetype: xml

Download Here

Blogger Template - 1024 px Theme

 

Title: 1024px Blogger
Author: Bloggero
Platform: Blogger, Blogspot
Filetype: xml

Download Here

Blogger Template - Adsense Ready

  3Bloggero - Adsense ready theme for Blogspot.com

Title: Adsense Read
Author: Bloggero
Platform: Blogger, Blogspot
Filetype: xml

Download Here

Blogger Template - Chocolate Fudge

Title: Chocolate Fudge
Author: carlgalloway
Platform: Blogger, Blogspot
Filetype: xml

Download Here

Blogger Template - Hawai

The only part of the template that needs to be edited for your own needs is the navigation bar, and to do this simply select the 'Edit HTML' screen and find

<+li><+a href="#">About Me<+/a><+/li>

Change the # sign on the a href tag to the URL of the link you want to use, and the About Me text to something more meaningful for your needs.

*Ignore the "+"

Title: Hawai
Author: carlgalloway
Platform: Blogger, Blogspot
Filetype: xml

Download Here

Video to Android - The Google Phone

Below is the video from Sergey Brin, where he begins by explaining how excited he is about Android. Yet, I don't see the excitement, not a smile, not any body movements, nothing. If you are excited about something, SHOW IT. The other guy who follows Sergey also seems bored with the whole thing. Scoble calls the $10M a bribe, I wonder more if indie developers will care seeing as tho there was no passion in any of these videos. Naturally corporate and startups will get their developers working on apps for this new OS.

So to sum up Android: It's a Google OS which is "open" to anyone to create whatever they want with. I can only guess that phones that support Android will ship with lots of fun Google apps pre-built.

Here is Sergey's intro video to Android:

[via Centernetworks]

Google Desktop for Linux 1.1 Beta

When we released the first version of Google Desktop for Linux this past June, we signaled a commitment to the Linux community: to develop for the platform and to support our Linux users. Since then, we have been hard at work to improve and refine our product. Today, we'd like to share what we've created by releasing Google Desktop for Linux 1.1 Beta.
Feedback from people like you shaped this update. Because many people wanted to search and launch applications, we added that functionality to the product. Desktop for Linux now supports many more image formats and will show better thumbnails for them in your search results. You can also customize the hotkey used to launch the quick search box. And most importantly, Desktop for Linux now searches the content of Microsoft Office documents - our most requested feature.
Please download the latest version and give it a spin. We hope you like it.

[via GoogleDesktop]

Windows Live wants to build Flickr competitor

It’s hard not to have seen this coming, but I have to wonder whether or not the world needs another Flickr or YouTube.

In a Microsoft job advertisement posted yesterday for a program manager position, the description clearly outlines Microsoft’s strategy to build a photo and video sharing website.

Come make Windows Live the best place to share your digital memories! Heard of Flickr? YouTube? How about. Mac? This role will work across the new Windows Live division with teams like Spaces, SkyDrive, Messenger and Hotmail to construct a winning strategy for Microsoft in photo and video sharing. This role involves leading the team to design the strategy then build and implement a winning solution that will be loved by millions of customers. This feature team is building a next-generation photo and video sharing service that will compete with flickr, smugmug and other photo web solutions today. This is a “v1” opportunity.

This role requires a strong PM with several product cycles of consumer experience. Successful candidates will have strong strategic thinking, outstanding cross team leadership and a proven track record of shipping. The right candidate for this position has an entrepreneurial streak - and functions well as part of a team. The ideal candidate has experience shipping consumer web solutions.

The Digital Memories Experience team (DMX) is helping people make deeper connections with those they care about. We want to give you the ability to effortlessly share your memories, be that a simple slideshow of photos and videos (e.g. evolution of the Vista Slideshow or of Photo Story), a carefully authored experienced (evolution of Movie Maker), or a fully interactive cinematic multimedia experience (a narrated 3D path through a Photosynth that you can control). And we want to make it easy and fun to enjoy your photos and videos, whether that is on the PC in your office, the Media Center in your living room, the XBox in your entertainment center, or on your mobile device when you are out and about. DMX is a part of the Windows Live Experience division (WLX/LEX), which also includes Mail, Hotmail, Messenger, SkyDrive, Spaces, Writer, Calendar, and Family Safety. To achieve our vision for digital memories we work with many other teams including: Core User Experience, Find & Organize, Graphics (Windows Imaging Codecs - WIC - and DirectX) in WEX, MCE, Expression, SmartFlow, and Xbox.

I hope this isn’t some sort of knee-jerk reaction like it was with MSN Soapbox, rather than a serious attempt to set a foothold in the photo sharing market. Whilst I love using Flickr and admire their service, there are still times I wish I didn’t have to pay $25 a year.

But in the mean time, it’s great the DMX team can put aside their differences and build Flickr integration into Live Photo Gallery.

[via istartedsomething.com]

Fix PDF Document Display Problems in Browsers

I’m not sure what is causing it but I do know that a lot of users have difficulties opening PDF files in browsers. In my former tech related job I had to find a way to find out why those pdf documents were not shown in the Browser correctly and how it would be possible to fix this issue and make them display correctly.

To be honest, I never found out why it was not working for some users. I asked them to update to the latest version which most of the time would fix the display problem. Sometimes however I would run into customers who had the latest version and still were not able to display the PDF documents in the browser.

Those customers usually received either a white page with no information whatsoever or a white page with a small red X icon (or a red square, a blue triangle, or a blue circle) in the upper left corner. If that was the case I started by asking them to download the PDF document in question and open it once it was downloaded to the system.

This usually worked which meant that it was a browser related problem. I soon discovered a method that worked in most cases. The Adobe PDF Reader has an option to display PDF documents in the browser window. I decided to turn this off and display the PDF document normally in the Adobe Reader at once.

Read More

[via ghacks.net]