Reason#1001 to port to Vista...

Everyone is geared up to face it...The underground brought it way back in December 2006, the official OEM version was already with the vendors a few fortnights back, if you are not interested in any of those, then you can buy a retail license for yourself, it was released last week. Obviously, I am talking about Windows Vista. I don't think it is unfair to say the wait has been little bit too long, but hey! it is almost over. The most printed letters on the desktop screen.. X-P- will cease to exist soon and will be replaced by clearer..glossier...vivid letters V-I-S-T-A.

Now there would be very few people who's not heard of the blazing features of Vista.. the Aero's visual delight...3d cascading of windows...are just a few of them. But here is one of those which you might not have heard about. But sure you are gonna love this one.

The concept of Wallpaper is pretty old, the practice of covering the walls with beautiful paperwork is centuries old, but it was Macintosh which actually bought it to the computer "desktop"and Windows made it popular. Now every computer desktop has a wallpaper but our conventional walls are decorated by razor thin plasma televisions. Maybe that is what made Bill think over it and give decade old wallpaper concept a break.

If that seems too poetic, I can't help it. That is how much "poetic" my technical mind can go, anyway, the news that got my jaws hitting the basement is that Vista is going to support video wallpapers. It is called Windows Dreamscene, and what they claim is that, the wallpaper, which could be your favourite mpeg/wmv video, will not eat up your CPU time. The idea sounds really unbelievable. They say they have some kind of "pre-rendering", by which your CPU is kept at lower heat. You can also put a Direct3D animation as a wallpaper. They have introduced a new format DREAM which would help author protect his creations.

But I am not surprised. When Microsoft came up with Windows 98, they added the feature where you could put a webpage as your wallpaper. Now, this is one step ahead, though, I must agree that the step has been rather steep.

Here is the rest of the story.
codevalley

Google: The rising of 2006??

2006 saw the rise and fall of many new brands in the Corporate IT. Whoever has been familiar with the silicon world would not find it hard to identify the names like youtube, orkut, adsense, wikimapia, blogger to name a few. But not all know that all these names are the derivates of one brand, a brand which is now familiar to every household, you can't get it wrong. Yes, it's G-O-O-G-L-E. Who would not have seen the nice and clear logo with red, blue and yellow letters? If you browse through my archives you may find it a little bit pro-google, but in fact this is not at all intentional, they were earned by their presence in the field.

Google filled the news columns of small and big perimeters all over the world throughout the year, be it the the much hyped youtube- google merger, the acquisition of this very blogspot, or the widespread of the orkut epidemic amongst the youth. They have easily pushed down the Microsoft with Vista, or Intel's release of the Core Series processors to become the newsmakers of 2006. What remained at the end of the day was google searchbar in every websites, even in desktops in the form of google desktop, and google adsense ticking the cash register of every small and big firm. The forecasters of the corporate have been predicting that Google would overtake Microsoft within 2009, I cant see a reason why they should go wrong.

Even though only a couple of nights of 2007 have seen dawn, already google is facing lot many challanges, the founder of wikipedia Jimmy Wales already have been caught commenting on cashing on flaws of google search to beat them, also heuristic search engines like powerset threaten to push google off the No.1 seat. Gmail was under the microscope after a serious flaw was discovered which could help spammers hijack the address book. Also a series of lawsuits are becoming the speedbreakers on the road to the victory for the search makers of the web. So let time decide the position of Google for the chinese year of pig.

Meanwhile here are a few Google's useful utilities that's yet to be popular but are worth a try.


Google Suggest
This a in the predictive version of Google search which still in the workshed. But anyone can try it. It is really worth a try.
Try it here





Google Download Accelerator
This is a small piece of software used in tandem with your browser to achieve faster loading of pages over a broadband network. It simply works a ISP which caches and preloads pages in a heuristic manner onto your local computer for faster loading.
Try it here


Always remember that google tracks every user with its umbrella of services like Search, blogger, adsense, which is present almost in all sites, so when you use any of Google services your behaviour is being watched and tracked...
As the Google's slogan says... "You can make money without doing evil"
codevalley