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SHARP DHP20H
2008-02-22 09:41:00
IN THE SAME price bracket as Sony’s BDP-S300 (far right ), the Sharp stands out from the crowd with its Quick Start mode, which chops down the time the player takes to get up and running from cold. It cuts the 30-60 second it takes in normal mode down to just 8-10 seconds in Quick start. Much more agreeable. Elsewhere, you’ve got 108op /24 output, and picture quality is must as peachy as the S300 , PS3 or LG. On planet audio, you get 5.1 analogue output as digital options including bitstream True HD via HDMI. Solid.

Microsoft Shows Off Web Ad Prototypes
2008-02-07 12:56:00
microsoft Corp.?s online advertising researchers will spend this year teaching computers to be smart about sticking ads into video clips, and to be even smarter about targeting ads to specific Web surfers.microsoft showed off a handful of early-stage advertising projects at its headquarters Tuesday that may or may not turn up as part of microsoft?s Web advertising platform.The demonstrations come just days after microsoft?s $44.6 billion bid for yahoo Inc., which, if successful, will boost the software maker?s Web traffic and online ad revenue.
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Felon Became COO of Wikipedia Foundation
2007-12-25 13:03:00
he foundation that runs - and accepts donations for - the online encyclopedia Wikipedia neglected to do a basic background check before hiring a chief operating officer who had been convicted of theft, drunken driving and fleeing a car accident. Before she left in July, Carolyn Bothwell Doran, 45, had moved up from a part-time bookkeeper for the Wikimedia Foundation and spent six months as chief operating officer, responsible for personnel and financial management. In March, she signed the small nonprofit's tax return, which listed more than $1.3 million in donations. At the time, she was on probation for a 2004 hit-and-run accident in Virginia that had landed her seven months in prison. Doran had multiple drunken-driving convictions, and records show earlier run-ins for theft, writing bad checks and wounding her boyfriend with a gunshot to the chest. The revelation comes as the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the volunteer-written Wikipedia and its sister Web encyclopedias in ot...
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Intex Showcases Their Range of Gadgets
2007-12-25 13:02:00
Intex Technologies (India) Ltd, Delhi, elaborated its business plans for Western India for FY 2007-08, in the city. Along with revealing their target of Rs. 115 crore from the region this year, they also had a wide range of their products displayed. Among the range were some of the new Intex mobile phones which have hit the Indian market aside from the Aura and Infi models that were launched earlier. The Envy 1044 is a lightweight mobile (78g) with a 1.8 inch TFT display sporting a resolution of 176 x 220 pixel resolution and 262k colors. It has video caller ID and the memory can be expanded. A 512MB card is provided with the box. It?s equipped with a 1.3 megapixel camera that records video. It supports MP3 playback and files can also be used as ringtones. It also has USB support. The Envy 1044 also has 8 embedded games and loudspeaker. It's priced at Rs. 4,990. The Flair 1107 has a 1.5 inch CSTN display with a resolution of 128 x 128 pixels and 65K colors. It also has a torch ...
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Sharp Teaming Up With Toshiba for LCDs
2007-12-25 13:00:00
Japanese electronics rivals Toshiba and Sharp are joining forces in the liquid crystal display business, company officials said Friday, the latest development in the intensifying competition in flat-panel TVs. More details will be provided later in the day when the presidents of the two companies will hold a news conference at a Tokyo hotel, the companies said. Speculation has been growing recently that Japanese electronics makers will need to work together in the panel business to compete against each other and formidable rivals such as Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea, Taiwan makers and others. The biggest players now in LCDs include Sharp Corp., Samsung, which has a joint venture with Sony Corp., and Hitachi Ltd. Recent media reports have said that Hitachi will drop out of LCD panel production by selling its stake in a joint venture it has with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which makes Panasonic brand products. Matsushita Electric has been eager to expand its LCD op...

Net?s next frontier ? your mobile phone!
2007-11-15 11:18:00
Search and find - on the move: Delegates at the GSM Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, check out Yahoo?s onesearch solution for handsets.Net?s next frontier ? your mobile phone!
More About: Phone , Mobile Phone , Frontier

Google launches mobile platform to extend its advertising reach
2007-11-15 11:18:00
Want to get some money? Develop an application for Google 's new "Android" mobile phone platform: the giant search company announced this week that it has $10m (£4.8m) to be awarded to people who develop programs for it.Google launches mobile platform to extend its advertising reach
More About: Mobile , Advertising , Reach , Platform

Paramount, DreamWorks adopts HD DVD Format
2007-08-22 09:32:00
Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation on Monday said they would distribute their high-definition movies exclusively in HD DVD, giving the Toshiba-based format a big boost against Sony-backed Blu-ray. The allegiance includes all moves distributed by Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount Vantage, Nickelodeon Movies, MTV Films, and DreamWorks Animation, which distributes its films exclusively through Paramount Home Entertainment. Paramount Pictures is a unit of entertainment conglomerate Viacom. Paramount plans to launch its first HD DVD under the exclusive program Aug. 28 with the release of the comedy Blades of Glory, which will be followed by Transformers and Shrek The Third. The three films represent more than $1.5 billion in box office ticket sales worldwide. The announcement did not include Steve Spielberg films, which will not be exclusive to either format. One of Hollywood's most commercially successful directors, Spielberg's films include Jaws, E.T. , Raid...
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Toshiba Planning 320GB Notebook Drive
2007-08-22 09:31:00
Toshiba Corp. will start producing a 320G-byte hard-disk drive for laptop computers before the end of this year.It is the first 2.5-inch drive to be announced at that capacity, with production to begin in the fourth quarter, according to sources. Pricing was not announced.The drive is one of a series of five that make up Toshiba's new MKxx52SX family of hard-disk drives. The 320G-byte model will contain two platters -- the circular disks on which data is recorded. Other drives in the range will offer between 80G bytes and 250G bytes of storage space. They will connect via a 3G bps (bits per second) serial ATA (SATA) interface.In today?s world the amount of data that can be stored on a hard-disk drive is constantly expanding as drive makers fine tune technology, and the needs of laptop users are growing in tandem with the expansion in drive space . While enterprise users might not require such a capacious drive, users of multimedia laptops will almost certainly welcome the extra spa...
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Mobile Printing redefined; thanks to HP's CloudPrint
2007-08-22 09:28:00
Hewlett-Packard Labs has come up with a solution that aims to address the problem of printing your files when you are on road and away from home--and its free, brilliantly useful CloudPrint service does so in an elegant way. The reasons you need to print while you're traveling can seem endless: you have to update a marketing presentation; need to print an e-mail with directions to an event; or you're on vacation and want to print a brochure you stored digitally your laptop. The trouble is, when you're traveling and using a shared computer--be it at hotel, a kiosk, or an Internet café--you generally can't print your own documents due to various problems.Enter HP's CloudPrint, named as such because you're uploading your files to live online, in the so-called "cloud," as industry jargon often refers to the Internet. The free service was quietly made public a few weeks ago; currently in beta, HP plans to continue to update and refine its service based on user feedback.I found Clou...
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Sony giving clues of launch of Rolly Audio Player
2007-08-21 06:03:00
Sony Corp. began a campaign in Japan on Monday for a new audio device called Rolly.As few details of the device are available but Sony is giving away a few clues. Chief among them is that Rolly is a "sound entertainment device.Sony also opened a promotion site called Rolly World that offers even less information. The site currently consists of a mass of small videos, each an apparently random clip of people doing things. There are three people dancing, a cat walking across the street, a taxi driver speaking to a passenger and a drink being poured into a glass.Each clip ends with a word or phrase that apparently has something to do with the Rolly. These words, which also scroll across the bottom of the screen, include: shuffle, share, music, small, motion, open and communication.There are lot of rumors about Rolly player .According to the sources, many reported on the existence of the player and said that it would be "egg-shaped," include a speaker, and can move or dance to music. Th...
More About: Audio , Sony , Player , Launch , Giving

Windows Patch made Skype crash
2007-08-21 06:02:00
The widespread failure of Skype 's Internet telephony service last week happened when millions of Windows users tried to log in to the system at the same time, after downloading a software update from Microsoft and rebooting their machines, Skype said Monday.Users encountered problems logging on to Skype's VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) service early Thursday morning, leaving them unable to connect until Saturday. Skype said that the load placed on its system as computers rebooted after receiving a routine set of patches from Microsoft's Windows Update service revealed a previously unknown bug in the Skype software.According to the sources, although the Skype network has a built-in self-healing function, the bug within the network resource allocation algorithm prevented the function from working as designed.Skype has identified the bug, which was a design error and not caused by hackers. The company has already introduced "a number of improvements" to its software to help res...
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A game; first of it?s type 'Wedding Dash'
2007-08-21 06:02:00
Fans of the hit game series "Diner Dash " have been anxiously waiting to swap brooms for grooms in first official offshoot game, "Wedding Dash."Available now for Windows-based computers, this downloadable "casual" game does not deviate far from what made its predecessors so popular but offers many challenging scenarios and laugh-out-loud moments.Game rs play as Quinn, a bridesmaid who reluctantly takes on the role of a wedding planner for a hapless friend, but soon realizes she's good at the job and decides to make a career out of it.Instead of taking care of restaurant customers in "Diner Dash," you must now pamper guests at a wedding reception, including seating them where they want (or don't want) to sit, serving them food (appetizers, entrees and cake), bringing song requests to the DJ and taking care of "incidents" such as breaking up a catfight between two bridesmaids, putting out a fire in the kitchen, handling inebriated guests and bringing tissues to Aunt Ethel who can't s...
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It?s time for 25th anniversary of Compact Disc
2007-08-20 07:16:00
Day was August 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany.An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compa ct Disc s, a product that turned 25 years old on Friday and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.Those first CDs contained Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony and would sound equally sharp if played today .The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs, eventually making CDs the most popular album format.The CD still accounts for the majority of the music industry's recording revenues, but its sales have been in a freefall since peaking early this decade, in part due to the rise of online file-sharing, but also as consumers spend more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment purchases, such as DVDs and video games.As the music labels slash whole...
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Now Cell Phone gets recharged by Wind
2007-08-20 07:16:00
All mobile users would probably have seen mobile phone chargers that can power multiple devices at once and sync data between your phone and a PC. They also would have even heard some rumblings about wireless chargers that power devices over the air or solar-powered cell phones. Have you seen wind-powered cell phone charger?According to the sources, a U.K.-based telecommunications firm, has announced plans to launch The Mobile Wind Char ger, a mini turbine that latches on to the top of a tent and stores power in a separate "control box" that users can plug into when their mobiles need power.The charger, which weighs roughly one-third of a pound and is small enough to fit into a backpack. In an environment with consistent 12 mph winds, it would take roughly 24 hours to charge an average cell phone.The charger was designed for use in outdoor settings, like the Glastonbury Festival, to provide environmentally-friendly energy for cell phone users and others who may want to stay connecte...
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One OS That Won't Die is Windows XP
2007-08-20 07:16:00
Microsoft Corp. has had to create a new build of Windows XP Professional for computer makers because the six-year-old operating system's continued popularity has nearly exhausted the supply of product activation keys.The new build, dubbed SP2c, includes no fixes or feature changes, but was created simply to address the shrinking pool of product keys. XP Pro SP2c, which has been released to manufacturing, will be made available to OEMs and system builders next month.Since Windows XP Professional is so popular, it has become necessary to produce more product keys for system builders in order to support the continued availability of Windows XP Professional through the scheduled system builder channel end-of-life (EOL) date.Microsoft has predicted continuing strong sales of Windows XP. Last month, the company's chief financial officer said that he tweaked the fiscal year 2008 forecast to account for XP's longevity. Rather than count on an 85/15 split in sales between Vista and XP, sa...
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Skype is back on track
2007-08-20 07:15:00
Skype almost fully recovered late Friday. Skype said the problem was related to a broken algorithm in its network that was preventing users from logging on. The sign-on problems have been resolved. Skype presence and chat may still take a few more hours to be fully operational.The system, however, still shows signs of shakiness. When I logged on at 3PM, around 5.5 million users were logged on to the network; an hour later only 4.1 million were logged on (Skype usually has 5 million to 6 million users logged on at any one time, with peaks of 8 million to 9 million). As I write this, just more than 4 million users are logged on. Still, Skype is in far better shape than it was early Friday, when only about 2.5 million users could get onto the system.News reports indicate that instant messaging and chat still are not fully operational. The user numbers will likely normalize over the weekend.
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Windows Vista Prevents Users from playing High Quality video and audio
2007-08-20 07:14:00
Feature of Content protection in Windows Vista are preventing customers from playing high-quality video and audio and harming system performance, even as Microsoft neglects security programs that could protect users.Vista requires premium content like high-definition movies to be degraded in quality when sent to high-quality outputs, so users are seeing status codes that say graphics OPM resolution too high.Microsoft acknowledged that quality of premium content would be lowered if requested by copyright holders, the sources reported. The protections allow copyright holders to prevent video from being played in high definition unless users have equipment that supports the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) digital rights management system developed by Intel. If PC users have graphics cards with video connections that don't support HDCP, they are out of luck.According to the sources,hardware costs will increase because vendors can't provide Vista-approved security func...
More About: Video , Audio , Windows Vista

Are Bigger Laptop PCs Better?
2007-08-18 08:27:00
A new category of supersized notebooks with screens larger than 20 inches could now be the real desktop replacements.A new category of supersize notebooks with screens larger than 20 inches has recently emerged to challenge our decades-long preference for smallness in portable computers.The reviewers and mobile computing experts tell us these monster notebooks aren't practical. They're heavy. They don't fit in standard laptop bags. They're too big to use on an airplane. There are three major players for this job ; Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Acer.These systems all sport huge, bright and sharp 20.1-inch 1,680 by 1,050-resolution monitors with game-quality 3-D graphics cards; full-size or near full-size keyboards; remote controls; loud, powerful stereo-sound systems with subwoofers; built-in webcams with microphones; built-in wireless and network ports; DVD-burning capability; large-capacity dual-hard drives; and every port and media card reader your desktop has. The features lists ...
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In U.S. Blu-ray Outsolds HD-DVD
2007-08-18 08:20:00
According to the sources, Blu-ray high-definition movie discs outsold films on the rival HD-DVD format by 2-to-1 in the United States in the first half of 2007.Total sales of Blu-ray discs, using a Sony Corp-backed technology, totaled 1.6 million units from Jan. 1 through July 1, compared with 795,000 HD-DVD discs sold in that period.HD-DVD was developed by Toshiba Corp and backed by Microsoft Corp and film studios such as Warner Bros.Both formats were launched in spring of 2006. An estimated 3.7 million high-definition discs have been sold, including 2.2 million in Blu-ray and 1.5 million in HD-DVD through the end of July, according to sources.Also Blu-ray got a further boost in August from strong sales of the "300" title. Sources told that about 190,000 Blu-ray units of the film, versus 97,000 in HD-DVD since July 31.The industry-wide standards war is reminiscent of the VHS and Betamax battle.

Microsoft fixes First Vista Gadget Bugs
2007-08-18 06:00:00
Microsoft Corp. patched several Windows Vista gadgets, the first time it's had to fix the small applications, prompting one researcher to mark the date as the real "arrival of the next-generation of exposures.According to the sources, the three bugs detailed in one of the nine bulletins could let attackers inject their own malicious code into a victim's Vista-powered PC. Three of Vista's bundled gadgets -- the small applications that sit on the desktop, usually pulling information from other programs or off the Web -- are flawed: the RSS, contacts and weather gadgets. The vulnerabilities in the RSS and weather gadgets are particularly dangerous, since both are enabled by default in a standard Vista installation.Sources revealed that if a user subscribed to a malicious RSS feed in the Feed Headlines Gadget or added a malicious contacts file in the Contacts Gadget or a user clicked on a malicious link in the Weather Gadget an attacker could potentially run code on the system.Althou...
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Technology to wear
2007-08-18 05:55:00
Technology has been shrinking in size as fast as it has been expanding our communication and entertainment horizons over the past 20 years. Today's latest gadgets are so refined and small that they clip on to a belt or slip easily into a pocket or a bag. The next challenge confronting designers and engineers is to make technology not only portable but also wearable.One of the most popular inventions that have come up is the solar bikini. The solar bikini is fitted with 1" x 4" photovoltaic filmstrips, which are sewn together with a conductive thread.A USB port allows the wearer to plug-in any number of small gadgets. According to sources, an iPod shuffle would be fully charged in just two hours. Although not shown at the fashion show, Schneider said that the male version would be available soon. Because of its larger surface the "i-Drink" will not only charge up your phone or your iPod but also generate enough power to chill a beer. The uses for the technology range from the frivol...
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Good Wishes now comes with a E-Card Virus
2007-08-18 05:46:00
Now a days ,a new form of false e-card notification e-mails are unleashing nasty viruses and virus-carrying Trojan horses on unsuspecting users.While e-card-triggered viruses and Trojan horses are not new, the latest versions are becoming more difficult for typical antivirus and antispam defenses to detect. The complexity is that the latest batch of fake e-card e-mail notifications are using plain text in their messages, which don't get scanned and scrutinized by antivirus and antispam defense applications. While the e-mails don't contain pasted links or attached files that a recipient can click on to get a computer infection, many e-mail clients automatically convert the included text into a clickable link when the e-mail clients recognize a Web address in the text.All recipients have to do to trigger the virus is to click on the link created by the e-mail client once they have read the message.Also the culprits sending these e-mails are using the names of some of the most popula...
More About: Virus , Card , Good , Wishes