When we last saw the Sony Vaio Z laptop, all 2.5 pounds of it, it was available in United Kingdom, but now it’s made its way across the pond. Starting for a shade under $2,000, the 13.1-inch ultraportable notebook comes complete with the Power Media Dock, which not only includes an optical drive but also [...]
"Friday, July 15, 2011
Sony introduces new Vaio Z laptop in the U.S., includes dock with external AMD graphics card
Sony introduces new Vaio Z laptop in the U.S., includes dock with external AMD graphics card: "
Windows and Desktop Software Aren’t Dead
Windows and Desktop Software Aren’t Dead: "
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The ‘debacle’ of Windows Vista and the proliferation of quality Web applications had Microsoft on a sticky wicket couple of years back. Critics, and even a section of fans, wondered if Microsoft could pull off a winner in Windows 7 against the negative sentiments and the overt Apple hype and if Microsoft was doing a wise thing investing in desktop applications in the age of online productivity suites.
Well the obituary writers were clearly wrong if the numbers are any testimony. Great reviews by both consumers and businesses followed the launch of Windows 7 in October 2009, and today at the annual Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles, Steve Ballmer announced that more than 400 million Windows 7 licenses have been sold in less than two years. During the keynote, Ballmer also announced that Office 2010, shipped in June 2010, has sold over 100 million copies.
Microsoft Corp.’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is a four-day event that celebrates the accomplishments of the company’s global partners. Steve Ballmer delivered the keynote on the first day of the event today before nearly 15,000 partners from around the globe. You can find the recording of the keynote here.
Windows is arguably the heart of the Redmond company and Windows and Office together have traditionally been major revenue-grossers for Microsoft in the consumer as well as enterprise market. A dent in this space would’ve hurt Microsoft’s overall ecosystem. In a rough sense, an enterprise not on Windows is most likely not a customer of any of the Microsoft’s slew of server and enterprise products.
The latest numbers reveal that Microsoft is still going strong with the old workhorses – in sales, if not in the mindshare. Windows 7 is the fastest-selling operating system in history and according to a previous statement by Microsoft, 7 copies of Windows 7 sold every second. According to Net Applications, Windows 7 is now running on 27.13% of all PCs worldwide as of June 2011. Office 2010 is also the fastest-selling version of Office in history.
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TAGS: Office 2010, Windows, Windows 7
Windows and Desktop Software Aren’t Dead originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Abhishek Baxi on Monday 11th July 2011 07:05:01 PM under Microsoft. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.
End of the Road for Microsoft Office XP and Vista SP1
End of the Road for Microsoft Office XP and Vista SP1: "
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Microsoft will be retiring Office XP and Vista Service Pack 1 at the end of the day. They will be reaching the end of their support phase (extended support phase for Office XP), which means that Microsoft will stop releasing hotfixes and security updates for these products.
Office XP was released way back in May, 2001. It introduced SharePoint, Web Services integration, speech recognition and more. However, the thing for which Office XP will probably be remembered fondly by users is not a new feature. Rather it’s the omission of a feature that had characterized earlier Office releases. In 2001, Microsoft finally killed Clippy, for good.
Clippy
Vista SP1 is a much more recent offering. It was released in a phased manner during the first quarter of 2008. However, it has since been superseded by Service Pack 2 and Windows 7. Vista Service Pack 1 fixed many of the annoying bugs that Vista had originally shipped with, in addition to adding support for exFAT file system, 802.11n wireless networking, IPv6 over VPN connections.
Windows Vista SP2 will lose its mainstream support on April 10, 2012, but extended life support will last till April 11, 2017. Extended life support as well as Mainstream support entitles users to free security updates, however the former doesn’t include non-security related miscellaneous updates. Microsoft is yet to announce the support lifecycle for Windows 7.
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End of the Road for Microsoft Office XP and Vista SP1 originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Pallab De on Tuesday 12th July 2011 12:33:41 PM under Microsoft. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.
Gold Safe – A Fraud Show on Indian Television Channels
Gold Safe – A Fraud Show on Indian Television Channels: "
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Gold Safe is a game show that is aired on Indian television channels NDTV Imagine and Zee TV. The game show titled “Guess the Celebrity”, awards you cash prize if you guess the celebrity’s name right. The show follows a simple rule. Viewers are asked to identify the celebrity, who’s face is partially shown. If the viewer gives the answer correct, he/she is awarded cash prizes ranging from Rs. 20,000 to one lac.
Gold Safe is a project by Cellcast Interactive India, a part of UK based broadcasting company, Cellcast Group. Cellcast Group was co-founded by Andrew Wilson and Bertrand Folliet who operate mainly Chat and Adult channels on DTT and Satellite TV. Their first operation, a British soft porn TV programme called Babestation, started way back in 2002.
Gold Safe started in India a couple of years back. I was not aware of this show until one of my friends told me about it. After listening to the explanation that my friend gave on how the show works, my first reaction was that it was a fake. Although I knew I was right, I did a check on it. As expected, it turns out to be a fake game show. The game show lured its viewers with false hopes of winning easy money.
The game looks easy to play, but to actually play it, you need to wait and wait for hours. In order to participate in the game, viewers are asked to dial the number 5664464 and answer the question once their call is connected. The call rates, however, are Rs. 12/minute on leading networks like Airtel, Vodafone, Aircel, Idea, Tata Indicom and so on. That’s more than ISD charges.
How do they manage to get people to call?
First of all, it is all about the money. Secondly, they have this 60-second timer that keeps popping up every now and then. If no one answers the question within the time limit, then the value of the question drops down. They also have these constant stupid chatters asking people to pick up the phone and call. Most of the times they are out of words and repeat the same shitty sentence again and again.
The whole problem with this show, is that callers are kept on hold for over 45 minutes, and are never connected. That’s Rs. 540 bucks in just 45 minutes from one caller. Now imagine that for 10 viewers making calls simultaneously.
Now you are wondering; “What about the people who call and frequently give wrong answers?” Well, those are all fake calls. These calls are made by someone internally or one of their crew members. The person who gets the answer right is also fake.
Here’s a picture of a celebrity. Viewers were asked to identify the celebrity and whoever got it right, stood a chance to win Rs. 85,000. Out of 7 callers, 6 people got the answer wrong. People guessed that the celebrity was Katrina Kaif, Shilpa Shetty, Tanushree Dutta and so on.
If I asked a 14-year old to guess who this celebrity was, I’m pretty dammed sure the kid would have answered Kajol – which is the right answer.
The show is aired live from 12.00 Midnight – 02.00 AM, all 7 days of the week. I doubt that it’s even a live telecast. I think it’s a pre-recorded show which claims to be “live”.
There’s also a Facebook page against Gold Safe, created in 2010. It states that -
This page is to counter the fraud on NDTV Imagine’s Gold Safe – where you are left on hold forever paying 10 bucks per minute on the phone. If you see this first – you know you have the right answers. If you watch this channel you are welcome to post
Here’s a clip of the game show posted on YouTube.
I happened to Google this topic and I was not surprised to see the number of complaints against Gold Safe. Viewers reported that the real callers were never connected, but were always put on hold. Here’s one such complaint reported on Indian Consumer Complaint Forum which has got over 130+ comments that are against the game show.
I did not expect such shows from NDTV and Zee TV. I am not sure why this show is still being aired despite the many complaints against it. If you have faced problems with this show, then please fill out this form to complaint against it. If you think that this is not fake, then please let us know your experience by adding a comment below.
A couple of months back, we had reported about Speak Asia being a scam survey site that promised to pay its registered users for answering surveys. Please do not fall for such game shows or survey sites that tempt you to earn big bucks.
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TAGS: Cellcast, Gold Safe Fraud, Goldsafe, Goldsafe Scam, NDTV Imagine, Zee TV
Gold Safe – A Fraud Show on Indian Television Channels originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Joel Fernandes on Wednesday 13th July 2011 01:08:59 PM under Scams. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.
Sneak Peek At Photovine, Google’s New Photo Sharing App for Smartphones
Sneak Peek At Photovine, Google’s New Photo Sharing App for Smartphones: "
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Photovine is the latest photo sharing service from Slide, which was acquired by Google back in 2010 to aim the “Social Gaming” domain. Last month there had been speculations about the service and now it is a reality. However, it is now in the invite-only stage. So either you have to wait for it to go live or you can head over to the Photovine official website and request an invite. Until then, let us take a quick look at its features.
As it seems from the website’s layout, the app is designed for iPhone only. However, it is sure to be available for smartphones with Google’s Android platform too. The service is aimed to share photos with other people allowing them to add their own photos reflecting the same mood. The photos can then be grouped together based on the user generated tags/captions. The idea is to grow an image by linking it to other related images in turn creating a photo vine with no limits.
Considering the line, “A picture is worth a thousand words”, photos with tags like “My Dearest”, “At the beach” or “Christmas” can grow into a photo vine that can tell you what others have to say. The concept is simple and viral. Let your images speak for you.
Meanwhile check out the Photovine official teaser video.
Photovine is expected (as indicated on their greeting email) to send out invites later this month. So, go ahead and book one.
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TAGS: Android, Google News, iPhone, Photo Sharing
Sneak Peek At Photovine, Google’s New Photo Sharing App for Smartphones originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Soumen Halder on Thursday 14th July 2011 07:00:12 PM under Mobile News. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.
Merge Word Documents to Outlook Email Recipients
Merge Word Documents to Outlook Email Recipients: "
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Summer’s here! The birds are chirping. The butterflies flutter by. All this just screams, “COMPANY PICNIC SEASON“! So let’s make some plans and get those invites out! Microsoft Word is a great way to make pretty invitations. But what is the easiest way to distribute them? You could attach your invitation to an e-mail, but then you would have to go through and select all of the recipients. You also have to consider the fact that putting all the recipients names in the “To:” field lets everyone who gets the e-mail see the e-mail addresses of all the other recipients. This is a real problem if you want to protect the identity of certain people. You could resolve this by placing all the recipients in the “BCC:” field, however, then you have to put something in the “To:” field or it just looks weird when the recipient gets it. Confused yet? This whole process can be simplified using the “Merge to Email” feature in Word.
Let’s begin by creating a custom contact folder Microsoft Outlook. In Outlook, right click your mailbox folder and choose “New Folder” from the menu. You will see the following window pictured below. Give your folder a name and make sure that the “Folder contains:” field has “Contact Items” selected. This will assure that we have a contact folder.
Next, add some contacts to your new contact folder. Pictured below, you will see the contact window with a couple of contacts shown.
Once you have all of your contacts entered in you new contact folder, you are ready to proceed to your invitation. Open Microsoft Word and type up your invitation. When you have it all typed up the way you want it, click the “Mailings” tab on the ribbon toolbar. See the picture below.
On the “Mailings” tab, you will see a button that says “Select Recipients”. When you click this button you will see a drop down menu where you can choose the source of your recipients. In this tutorial you will choose “Select from Outlook Contacts” from the menu shown in the picture below.
You will now see the window, pictured below, asking you to select the Outlook contacts folder. Choose the appropriate folder and click OK. Choosing the contacts folder will set that folder as the source for the merge in Word.
You now have the opportunity to pick and choose which contacts from that folder you want to receive the invitation. Note that all contacts in the folder are selected by default. In the picture below, you will see little check boxes beside each contact name. Simply click the check box to select or deselect the contacts you wish to send to. When you are finished, click OK.
Now the magic really starts to happen. Let’s personalize the invitation to show the recipients first and last names at the top. To do this, make sure your cursor is at the top of the page, then, from the “Mailings” tab choose “Insert Merge Field”. This will give you a drop down menu with all of the fields in the contact folder you chose. See the picture below.
Now, choose the “First” field. Notice you get a little merge field at the top of your document with the word “<<First>>” listed, as pictured below. What this means is when you finish the merge, and your contact receives the e-mail, they will see their first name in this spot on the document. Go ahead and hit the space bar, and insert the “Last” merge field too, so that the recipients last name will appear there as well.
Double click the “First” field to see formatting options, as pictured above. Here you can change the font style and size. Go ahead and set the font to look the way you would like for the recipient to see it.
The last step in the process is to click the “Finish & Merge” button on the “Mailings” tab. You will see the drop down menu pictured below. Click the “Send E-mail Messages” option to start the merge. Now all of the recipients you picked from the contacts folder will receive an email with the invitation in the body of the message. WARNING! Once you click “Send E-mail Messages”, the message is immediately sent! There will be no dialog boxes asking you to click OK or anything. So don’t click this button until you are ready for it to go.
You can verify that the mailing went out by checking your “Sent Items” in Outlook. You will notice that every contact received a single message. This means there is no more worry about hiding people’s email in the “BCC:” field. Problem solved!
Hopefully you will find this feature useful for your next big mailing. Oh, by the way, don’t forget to save me a little dessert at the picnic! ;)
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Merge Word Documents to Outlook Email Recipients originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Darrin Jenkins on Thursday 14th July 2011 10:09:38 PM under How To. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.
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