Tech Buzz

Mr. Battelle, a founder of Wired magazine and the Industry Standard, wasn't the first person to figure this out. But he did find a way to describe the digital crystal ball better than anyone else had. He called it "the database of intentions."

A few weeks ago, Google took a big step toward changing this — toward making the database of intentions visible to the world — by creating a product called Google Trends (GT). It allows you to check the relative popularity of any search term, to look at how it has changed over the last couple years and to see the cities where the term is most popular. And it's totally addictive.

YOu may like to try the following ....

Coke vs Pepsi

Yahoo vs Google (don't be surprised by results, why would some one search for google on Google)

Opera vs Mozilla ( I'm loving GT)

Opera vs Firefox ( now I hate GT)


Source : NY Times through TOI

5. Find popular car models. Do the same as above: type [car brand] and you'll get a list of models. For Porsche, the most popular models are: 911, Cayenne and Carrera GT.

6. Find popular movies. Most people that want to find a movie review go to IMDB. To do that, search for imdb + title of the movie. To find popular movies, just type imdb and optionally a letter or two. If you type [imdb m], the first title will be "Million Dollar Baby". Similarly you may find the most popular movies starting with letter A-Z and 0-9.

7. Find if your site is popular. No one knows why, but many people type URL addresses in the search box. So if your site is download.com or linux.org, you'll find in the Suggest list.

8. You have a commercial software. But is it so good that people try to find cracks to use it for free? If you type [photoshop c], you'll see "photoshop cs crack".

9. Want to go back in time? Type a year in the search box and find popular events from that year, great cars, TV shows. In 1949 film noir was popular.

10. Autocomplete code. It's useful if you use a simple text editor that doesn't autocomplete standard values. If you don't remember the values of the display attribute in CSS, type [css display] and you'll get your answer. It may be display:none, display:inline or display:block. You get the answer instantly without reading a manual or even searching with Google.

Other flavours of Google Suggest

1. News Suggest

2. Financial Suggest (enabled by default)

Source: Googlesystem

1. You change your mail account and you want to send all your emails from the Gmail account to your new one. Set a filter without any restriction and forward all the emails. That might also be useful to backup your emails.

2. Forward more emails at once to a friend. Create a temporary label, set the label to the emails you want to forward, create a temporary filter that forwards the emails to your friend. And that's it. Don't forget to delete the filter after that.

3. You want to archive your olds emails .

4. Delete all the emails from your ex-girlfriend.

5. Set the label "jobs" to all the emails that contain job in the subject.

6. Merge two labels (A, B). Set the label B to all the emails that have label A. Just type "label:A" in the "Has the words" input box and choose "apply the label B".

7. Filter your sent emails. Include "label:sent" in the "Has the words" input box.

NB:- This feature is not available to all users. I am still waiting for this to be incorporated in my gmail account.

Source: Googlesystem

Seagate knows that you can never have too much storage space at your disposal, which is why the company's just bulked up its well-received NAS line with the 1TB Maxtor Shared Storage II. Like other products of the same ilk, the SS II allows up to 20 connected Mac or Windows PCs to send and receive data to and from the two 7,200RPM 500GB hard drives, which can also be configured in a RAID 1 array for an extra level of protection. A high-speed Gigabit Ethernet connection should ensure rapid file transfers, and two built-in USB ports allow you to connect a printer or other peripheral device for sharing among multiple users. You're also getting UPnP support here, so with the proper adapters you can stream tunes, vids, and pics to compatible networked A/V gear throughout your pad. The Shared Storage II is scheduled for release sometime this month, but such a capacious device doesn't come cheap: expect to throw down around $900 if you're interested in this whole-house storage and backup solution.

I recently came across this web based tool Yahoo! Photo Ripper (YPR) which helps you in downloading photographs stored on Yahoo Photos (personal or others available publically) in Full size. By full size I refer to the actual size in which one uploaded to Yahoo.

This web tool is important in the sense that it allows the owner of digital photos to get back his photo in the actual size and not just lame 480x360 size which Yahoo offers for free. I feel it is not right on the part of Yahoo to charge the owners for what is rightfully theirs.

I am very grateful to the software developer as today it helped me in getting back my old photos .

No, it's not another amazing new piece of software from Google, which will type for you (though that would be nice). Just something that Dan Cohen noticed while looking at many nineteenth-century books in Google's massive digitization project.
It also reminds us that despite our perception of Google as a collection of computer geniuses, and despite their use of advanced scanning technology, their library project involves an almost unfathomable amount of physical labor. I'm glad that here and there, the people doing this difficult work (or at least their fingers) are being immortalized. 

Those not believing in the screenshot can view for themselves  here at Google Book Search. In case you are not able to view the hand by clicking link above then try this. (Obtained by google translation service)

Talk about getting your wires crossed. In the same week that Microsoft sounded the trumpets for the arrival of their online preview for Office 2007, they're now announcing a shipping delay for the office suite.

"Based on internal testing and the beta 2 feedback around product performance, we are revising our development schedule to deliver the 2007 system release by the end of year 2006, with broad general availability in early 2007," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars Technica.

The company had previously planned an October release, although speculation that Office 2007 would be delayed began shortly after Windows Vista's own ship date slipped from the fourth quarter of 2006 into early 2007. Pragmatically speaking, this means that the company will launch its mainstream promotions for Office 2007 almost simultaneously with Windows Vista.

How much of a change this represents for Microsoft's marketing plans is unclear. The October release was already low-key, aimed primarily at getting OEMs on board in advance of holiday sales. For the consumer market, the expectation has been that Microsoft's marketing department would ride the Vista wave while trying to hawk Office. That's unlikely to change now, unless Windows Vista slips again. Ballmer has hinted that Windows Vista could see another delay, but those hints are largely vacuous, and seem to be primarily centered on timing issues framed in terms of weeks, not months. We expect that Microsoft will shortly announce free upgrade programs for computers purchased this holiday season for both Windows Vista and Office 2007. At the very least, such a move would allow Microsoft to talk up their "units shipped" quickly after launch

According to Microsoft, over 2.5 million people have downloaded the Office 2007 beta. It marks a significant development for the company, insofar as they are abandoning many years of a largely consistent user interface in favor of an almost entirely redesigned system. Microsoft believes that the redesign will pay off in spades as customers find new productivity enhancements, but the marked difference from versions past could be considered a risk for the company, should the Office 2007 System meet mostly disinterested customers. IT buyers in particular have expressed concerns that the new user interface could end up costing companies more as they retrain users. Office developers, on the other hand, have said that the new user interface was originally conceived with to require little to no training to use effectively.