Wikiwix Launched

Wikipedia a famous encyclopedia on internet launched its independent search engine wikiwix.com to index all is contents. Though it is not officially launched by Wikipedia, but it came as a surprise to all the Wikipedia visitors.


Wikipedia is a web based free content encyclopedia project. The main difference in this encyclopedia with Britannica or others is Wikipedia is like a Democratic encyclopedia. Most of the articles can be edited by anyone with access to internet. The English edition launched in early 2001, as a complement to Nupedia which was a same encyclopedia as Wikipedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free contents. It was founded by Jimmy Wales, but Nupedia lasted from mid 2000 to ending 2003.

During the free software movement in early 2001, Nupedia started Wikipedia as their side project before entering the peer review process. Over the period, Wikipedia has grown vastly and formed its own identity. Now Wikipedia is one of the 15 most visited sites on internet.

Other Major Projects from Wikipedia includes

Wiktionary, a dictionary project launched in December 2002

Wikiquote, a collection of quotations launched a week after Wikipedia was launched.

Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written books


From the above information, you might have got a basic idea about how vast is Wikipedia and at what rate it is expanding. Wikipedia has nearly 7.2 million articles in 251 languages, 1.7 million of which are in English. Wikipedia receives between 10,000 and 30,000 page requests per second depending on the time of the day. More than 100 Servers have been set up to handle the traffic.

Samsung- An emerging Technology

Samsung is re-inforcing its technology from day to day and every upgrading model will be thinner and lighter when compared with its predecessor. Samsung became the first company to produce a 10 mega pixel camera cell phone. This was launched last year in Korea. Earlier in 2000 Samsung became the first company to embed a cell phone in a camera, also in 2004 it again formed a record by introducing its 5 mega pixel camera phone and off-course, who can forget its 7 mega pixel camera in 2005. I will be featuring the 10 mega pixel camera phone model SCH-B600 in this post, this phone was launched in Korean market last year. It also offers the same level of picture-taking sophistication that a top-notch megapixel digital camera offers.


This camera phone is called as B600, it is 6mm thinner and 10grms lighter than its predecessor i.e.. 7 mega pixel camera phone. The B600 offers the same picture quality which a 10 mega pixel camera offers. The functions in B600 includes an MP3 player, business card reader, and 128 polyphonic sounds. It has 3X optiplex zoom and 5X digital zoom. It comes with LED auto focus feature which allows you to capture clear picture even in dark. The moving picture can be recorded in QVGA resolution at 15 to 30 frames per seconds, you can also watch TV in crisp picture through Satellite DMB function.

The price of B600 is around 900,000 won (about $ 900) in Korea.


SCH-B600 Specifications

Standard CDMA 2000 1X EVDO (800 MHz)
Camera - 10 Megapixel Camera
Display - 2.2" 240x320 16M Color TFT LCD
Features - Mobile TV (Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcasting ); Video Recording & Messaging (MPEG4 / H.264); MP3/ AAC / AAC+; Dual Speaker / Anycall Band; Bluetooth Technology / PictBridge / Voice Recognition/ Document Viewer / TV-output / BT Printing
Memory - External memory (MMCmicro)

* Specifications are subject to change without notice

Silverlight- A New Role to Web Browser

This time it is a new family rather then the upgrade of the existing product. Recently, in NAB conference Microsoft has launched its new web product called Silverlight. According to Microsoft, this product will be competing with Adobe Flash even though they are different in their offering services. The languages supported are PHP, XHTML, Apache C#, JavaScript (ECMA 3.0), VB, .NET, Python and Ruby with Python and Ruby supporting in their respective licensing policies. This product will benefit developers a lot. They can build a normal JavaScript and copy it in Silverlight where it can perform a multiple times faster than what it does in normal web browser. Everybody knows that Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere or WPF/E was in news from quite some time now. Microsoft introduced Silverlight as one of the products of this technology pool. The latest release was 1.0 beta with alpha release of version 1.1 made available as well.

Silverlight is a cross browser, cross platform plug-in to improve your web experience. Designers can design W3C standards web pages. It runs in all popular browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera. CNET gathered the information about How big guys on internet Like Netfllix, Major league Base Ball team and Web developer plans to make use of this technology. Silverlight Beta 1.0 is just a 1MB download and it takes less than 1min to get installed on your pc. The universal package contains both Intel and power pc versions. Silverlight will be available in public this summer.

Supporting Platform

Silverlight is supported by all the popular web browsers like Ie6.0, 7, Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari. The present version is not supported on Opera and on windows 2000 machines, Microsoft is planning to make it available in future versions.


The Future

It looks like Microsoft has joined the race with yahoo! and Google to make heavy bucks. Its for sure that this product is going to fill Bill’s pocket. But speaking frankly, the main aim of Microsoft till now is to provide effective and user friendly services to its customers. This looks to be a new area where Microsoft has entered to render its services, in near future, there are lot of such surprises which we will be getting from this software giant. Tim a microsoft blogger says that there is a big surprise up their collective corporate sleeve which will soon be announced at mix . In his post on techcrunch, Nik Cubrilovic writes that this service may be pushed by Microsoft overnight with their windows updates or with hotmail services, but till now there are not such declarations made by Microsoft.



Useful Links


For more details visit the Silver Community and Silver Site

Developers and Designers If you are a developer, you will find this one interesting.

Silverlight on Wikipedia




Videos

Extend your Browser Programming model with Silver light [By Stefan Schackow: Microsoft]

Ray Ozzie Chief Software Architect [Developer Of Lotus Notes: IBM Corporation]

Get Auto Saved With Blogger

Today, Blogger has added a most welcomed feature in its service. This is the Auto Save option. Now you don't need to worry about the un-predictable hardware or software failures on your system. Blogger will take all the pains to auto save your post in the form of a Draft.

This is done every minutes, unless you are a professional typist. If you are typing very fast to compete with Blogger Servers, then as soon as you stop typing, Blogger will save your contents just to keep you on safe side.



Even now, when I am writing this post, every word of mine is getting auto saved in their servers. Just to make you updated with what is happenning to your contents, you will see the save now button in two colors (grey and blue). When ever your contents gets saved, it turns to grey color, mentioning the time at whih your content was autosaved.


The Disadvantage

There is a problem here, your post gets saved with the date on which you satarted writing. Lets say if you have started writing on your post on 18th May at 8:00pm, and completed at 19th May 6:00am. When you publish your post, it will be published with the date as Posted on 18th May at 8:00pm rather than 19th May 6:00am.

Apart from auto save, Blogger has also introduced the keyboard shortcuts to save, publish and preview your blog. Now Ctrl-P publishes your Post, Ctrl-S saves your post a draft, and Ctrl-D switches from published to draft. The Preview option has been moved over to Ctrl-Shift-P.

So enjoy the new features.

Microsoft Pushes Windows Live Hotmail For Public

After Google, its Microsoft’s chance to provide more space to its e-mail customers. Microsoft Pushes Windows Live Hotmail from its Beta status for public use. Though it was in news since the ending of year 2005 with the name “Windows Live mail”, but after going through its beta status, Microsoft has changed the name to “Windows Live Hotmail”. According to Microsoft, this product is a significant upgrade to MSN hotmail. It gives flexible access via the web on a mobile phone or with an e-mail client. Microsoft’s main aim was to bring all its services like Live.com, Live Search, Windows Live messenger, Windows Live space and Windows Live hotmail to a single mega service.




Presently Windows Live Hotmail is in two versions, the classical version to run smoothly on a slow speed internet pc and the Full version for high speed internet users. Full version offers the feature of viewing messages in the preview pan like we do in Outlook 2003 & 2007.



Features

A fresh new look, more space (2GB), some added features and accessing all the microsoft services in a single click. You can search the web as well as your mail from your hotmail account. Using Contact Importer you can directly import your contacts from outlook mail client to your hotmail client. This tool is a free download from the hotmail web site. You don’t need to add all the contacts manually. Simply run this exe to upload all your contacts from outlook to your hotmail account.




Security


Microsoft does the home work to finding out whether the mail in your mailbox is from a secure source or is a phishing attempt by some bad guy. You can mark your mail safe if it is form a known sender. The red and yahoo bar present at the top of your mail warns you about these attempts by making the un-secured mail to appear in red color and the safe one in yellow. Microsoft in collaboration with Micro Trends, makes your mails virus free.



But still it lags with Google in terms of the space availability. Windows Live Hotmail offers 2 GB of space when compared to Gmail at 2.8 GB. Yahoo is a way long way back with 1GB of space. If you need more space in your Hotmail account, you can pay extra 20 bucks to get it. Yes, you can get extra 2GB of storage by paying $20 per year. Microsoft also announced its new product, “Microsoft Office Outlook Connector Beta” using which, all its live hotmail customers over the web can access their mails free using Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007. In future, Microsoft is also looking forward to introduce its Windows Live Mobile mail product.

So, What are you waiting for? Get your Windows Live hotmail Now .



To Read more about this just click the links below:


Windows Live Hotmail to debut Monday


It Lives! Microsoft launches Windows Live Hotmail


Microsoft to introduce Windows Live writer


Windows Live Hotmail Briefing