New figures from Net Applications shows that Microsoft’s Windows Vista shares in last one year leaped more then 355% and in the same year Apple’s operating system share gained more then 32% of operating system market share. Net Applications reports that the Mac had 7.94% market share in June, up from 6.03% a year ago. Going from a little more than 6% to just under 8% may be a big gain when measured as a percentage of growth. But when seen in absolute numbers, it’s not particularly impressive.

Vista, by way of contrast, showed far more explosive growth. In June, 2007, it had 4.54% market share. In June, 2008, it had reached 16.14%; more than a 355% gain. Those numbers are substantial not just in percentage terms, but in raw terms as well. Apple would sell the first-born children of most of its employees if it could ever get to a 16% market share.

For a chart of overall operating system trends, according to Net Applications, click here. For a chart that includes version numbers, click here.

Source: PCWorld.

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Hi guys,

I am Graison and I have recently joined this site. I would be posting on Non Technical topics, mostly on Economics, Politics and sometimes on Hollywood Movies. I would be coming out with my first post pretty soon.

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Now this is what we call competition. Apple tried to capture the mobile phone market with their innovative multi-touch iPhone. And here it is. iPhone’s competitor is taking shape now. Microsoft and Mitshubishi, are trying to change the way, we interact with computers. Ofcourse, iPhone and Surface has already shown the dustbin to your age old keyboard and mouse.

But still, iPhone users suffers from the problem of fat fingers. Using iPhone’s map feature and keyboard is really not so easy. So, Microsoft and Mitshubishi tried to solve this very issue. And voila, we have got something that’s really cool. Well, Microsoft has given it the name of Lucid Touch, and its still in research phase. But, one can expect it to be out by 2011.

But what exactly this Lucid Touch thing is? Well, its a multi-touch device. So, isn’t an iPhone a multi-touch device. Well, yes it is, but wait, in iPhone, you use screen to touch and navigate. Here, in Lucid Touch, you can use the back of the screen too. When you hold the device in your hand, your fingers will cast a shadow on screen. That means your device will act like if its a psuedo-transparent, just like those shown in Steven Spielberg’s Sci-Fi movie. So, if you have got fat fingers, that’s not an issue anymore. Wow, it sounds cool, rite. But sadly, its a mere prototype, and is way too bulky. So, for the time-being, you can read more about the same, and get a glimpse of the next revolution, on Microsoft Research Site.

   Surely, one thing is true. Microsoft do knows how to stay in the market. Even if Vista was a failure, they have got Surface, and this Lucid Touch, to compensate for the losses.

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According to Top500, More then 85%  of world’s supercomputers run on Linux operating system. The open source operating system powers no less then 427 supercomputers of world including the world’s fastest supercomputer. Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and Windows HPC 2008 (which have now reached Release Candidate 1 stage) combined account for just 1% of the Top500 supercomputers, running on just five systems.

Read the rest of this entry…

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Earlier this week Adobe said a statement that it’s work with Google and Yahoo 

To enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.

And this is said on Google Blog

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

But there is no one talking about what is the role of Microsoft Silverlight.

• Is Microsoft Silverlight content can be search and index by search engines?
• Are these search engines interested searching and indexing Silverlight content? 

After searching on web I find that Microsoft has added the technology in Silverlight that help search  engines to easily index Silverlight content. What Microsoft officials said on this

Microsoft designed Silverlight from the beginning to be easily accessible by search engines.  Because it is simply a ZIP archive, a Silverlight application packaged in a XAP (the Silverlight application-package file extension) file is easily accessible to search engines without a special software development kit (SDK). And because XAML is W3C-compliant XML, any static textual XAML content can be easily parsed by search engines.  Furthermore, any metadata embedded in the ZIP file is easily indexed by search engines as well.  Silverlight applications also support “deep linking” as they easily consume the URL they were loaded from, and use information on the URL query string to rapidly load and display appropriate data.  Finally, the Silverlight DOM itself can be easily inspected to detect all text, links and images that are being visualized by the control.

So does this mean that Silverlight offers customers superior search engine optimization (SEO)? Yes.  Not only was Silverlight architected to offer superior searchability, but Silverlight excels at enabling dynamic content published from content management systems to be easily indexed by search engines.  By publishing dynamic content to Silverlight via XAML and XHTML mirroring, users are able to dramatically reduce the time it takes to optimize content for search engines.

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Today I saw this book in Wipro ISD (that’s what they call a library).  Just by judging from the cover, I was amazed on the writing style, this book has followed. Teaching programming and that too, using games, is quite a noble idea. And in this book of C#, it worked well too. After reading more, I came to know that this is not just a book, but a full series in name “For Absolute Beginner”. Can’t say, how good it feel to learn programming languages, by writing some cool and interesting games. In the end, you can always enjoy your day’s work, playing that same game for hours.

   And yeah, not to forget the sense of achievement, one gets after finishing up writing something useful, instead of stupid “Hello World” programs, and that too, from day one. A must read for every beginner, in programming world, this book also provides you code snippets,  in the CD (which comes with the packaging). All I can say, its a total solution to all those who ever dreaded learning a new language. Although, it is just for beginning purpose, you can’t master the skills just by reading this book. For that, go, grab some professional reading material.

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Spammers are now using Amazon’s Clod service EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud). Over last couple of days Sophos has detected a good amount of spam messages, telling users that your computer require a critical Microsoft Windows Update. This is oldest and best trick used by spammers to spread spam messages. There is no clear indication why spammers using Amazon EC2 to spread the spam messages but may be Amazon EC2 is well know and trustworthy site, users will be fooled into getting infected.

In order to stay protected, you should disregard any message with the following subject lines:

• Critical Microsoft Update
• Critical Update Notification
• Important Microsoft Update
• Important Update Notification
• Important Windows Update.

Basically, anything stating that you need some sort of critical update.

Spam message Screenshot taken from Sophos website

Alert message of Sophos Anti-virus

The emails arrived via an IP that is part of a botnet:

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Adobe released on Tuesday July 2, 2008 latest version of PDF reader software “Adobe Reader 9”. Adobe has added native support for Flash technology to it’s PDF viewer software. Adobe Reader 9 introduces a new term “PDF Portfolios”, ability to unify a wide range of content into one single document. In addition to all these features Adobe Reader 9 also provides the ability to collaborate with live PDF documents with it’s online PDF editing suite.

Adobe Reader 9 loads PDF files fast as compare to earlier version of PDF readers. Adobe has added support for digital signature and 256-bit AES encryption to gives user to a more secure PDF experience.

The Acrobat 9 family consists of Acrobat 9 Standard, Acrobat 9 Pro, and the new Acrobat 9 Pro Extended software. The most comprehensive member of the family, Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, includes Adobe Presenter software for easily turning Microsoft PowerPoint presentations into multimedia experiences that can be published as PDF files.

Download Adobe Reader 9

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Today on Tuesday July 1, 2008 Passpack has released the desktop version of it’s online password manager software. Passpack Desktop is based on Adobe AIR. Desktop version of Passpack is best suited to use as a backup of all your online passwords. This new release automatically synchronize to Passpack online.

Best thing about the Passpack for desktop is there is no need to setup an online Passpack account. Users can manager their passwords using Passpack’s desktop software and it’s free to. When ever users signup with Passpack online this software automatically synchronize to Passpack online.

Passpack desktop is free: for everyone and forever. The code is released
under a Creative Commons license, so programmers can have a look under
the hood to verify the security.

Passpack Desktop Features

• Same top security and easy interface as the online password Manager, and easy to install.

• Access your passwords even if you can’t reach Passpack.com.

• Automatically backup your Passpack.com account during Passpack Desktop setup.

• Push-button sync integrates Passpack Desktop with new/changed passwords from Passpack.com.

• Better flow of communication from the online version to the desktop version

• Endless number of password storage.

• Ability to use the desktop version exclusively, online becoming then an option.

Passpack Desktop Screenshot

Technorati Tags: Passpack,Password Manager

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People often think that free software means open source software. Most people think that Linux is free software. Software’s that run on Linux operating system is absolutely free but this is not the case. There is a lot of difference in all these terms. After studying a lot of websites I found some real good facts that I am sharing with you.

Freeware: Freeware software’s are available to use with no cost. Proprietary software’s can also be freeware software. Freeware software’s are generally used by companies to help developers, students and communities to develop software skills while using this freeware software, but not to loose their business potential software companies don’t give the source code of the software’s. Freeware software is different from shareware software. Shareware software’s are used for marketing purpose. Computer users can download and use a limited version of software or full version of software for a limited period of time. We can say that Shareware software is just like “Try before you buy”.
Freeware generally refers to software that is copyrighted and the term shareware refers to commercial software that is copyrighted, but which may be copied for others for the purpose of their trying it out with the understanding that they will pay for it if they continue to use it

Free Software: Free software can be used, modified and studied without any restriction. Free software can be copied and distributed with or without any modifications. A software is free when the end user get’s full software with the human readable form of the program called as source code with above permissions. Free Software Foundation maintains the definition of free software
The definition published by FSF

1. Run the program, for any purpose.

2. Study how the program works and adapt it to your needs.

3. Redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.

4. Improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Open Source: Open source software can be defined as computer software for which the source code of the software is available under a copyright that must meet the open source definition.
Open Source Definition

1. Free Redistribution: the software can be freely given away or sold. (This was intended to expand sharing and use of the software on a legal basis).

2. Source Code: the source code must either be included or freely obtainable. (Without source code, making changes or modifications can be impossible.)

3. Derived Works: redistribution of modifications must be allowed. (To allow legal sharing and to permit new features or repairs.)

4. Integrity of The Author’s Source Code: licenses may require that modifications are redistributed only as patches.

5. No Discrimination against Persons or Groups: no one can be locked out.

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: commercial users cannot be excluded.

7. Distribution of License: The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product: the program cannot be licensed only as part of a larger distribution.

9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software: the license cannot insist that any other software it is distributed with must also be open source.

10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral: No click-wrap licenses or other medium-specific ways of accepting the license must be required.

There can be different open source copyright laws enforced by different software vendors.

Technorati Tags: Freeware Software,Free Software,Open Source Software

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