Sunday, October 25, 2009

Download Torrent Files

BitTorrent is becoming more popular day by day as it’s the most convenient way to download stuffs online, yet. Torrent files get downloaded much faster than normal HTTP, HTTPS or FTP downloads. Being peer-to-peer network, BitTorrents can give the maximum possible download speed with built-in supports like download accelerator, download manager etc. Since copyright issues revolve around BitTorrent files, it would be nice to check for legal issues before downloading torrent files. However, this tutorial is on the steps you need to take to download torrent files.


Many people complain that they have just downloaded the torrent file but it’s too small in size and does not open using any application. In fact torrent files are just like the ticket to download the full file. Once you have downloaded the torrent file, you need to open it using a torrent client. uTorrent, Azureus, are few examples of popular torrent clients. You can download torrent files from some large torrent sites such as TorrentBox, Demonoid etc.

Downloading Torrent Files using Torrent Clients:
  1. Download any torrent client and install on your system
  2. Download any torrent file and double click to open it using the torrent client
  3. Choose a location to save the file
  4. Now the torrent file download should start immediately
  5. You are done.
You don’t need to involve yourself in downloading torrent files. It works in the background process and you can see a notification on the system tray area once your torrent client finishes downloading the torrent file.
Read rest of entry

Trick to Find Windows Vista Product Key Number

There are occasions when we need to uninstall Windows Vista and make a fresh installation. In order to continue with either fresh installation or repairing Windows Vista, you need to have Windows Vista product key number. Windows Vista product key number is written over the genuine Vista CD or DVD. But if you have lost the original Windows Vista CD or DVD, you will find it very difficult to get along with Windows Vista installation.

Windows Vista requires a product key to verify the genuineness of the copy you are trying to install. After installation, the system stores the product key number in system registry but in encrypted format. It’s very hard to decrypt the product key number and use it during fresh installation. In order to get rid of this problem, you can use Windows Vista product key finder.

Product Key Finder is a tool that decrypts the information from system registry and shows the product key number that you used during Windows Vista installation. It’s pretty easy and takes less that 15 minutes for the Key Finder tools to find Windows Vista product key number. You can follow this tutorial to find lost Windows Vista serial key or product key easily. These tools are available for free download.
Read rest of entry

21 things you never knew about Windows, Microsoft and Bill Gates

1. Windows 1.0 was released on 20th Nov 1985 and the hardware requirements were 256KB of RAM, DOS 2.0 and two floppy drives, two years late.
2. The retail price was $100, which is worth about $177 in today’s money – the same as Windows XP Home.
3. Microsoft sent out a press kit featuring a squeegee and a washcloth to announce the launch of Windows 1.0, a full two years before the product was launched.
4. If Bill Gates had got his way, he would have called it “Interface Manager”. 21 years later, I don’t think Interface Manager Vista, or Vista Interface Manager would have had the same ring to it….
5. When Vista was launched Microsoft were David fighting Goliath, and had to fight many court battles:
“We weren’t kidding that we bet the entire company on it,” Gates recalls. “The strange thing was we were a much smaller company at the time. We were competing to establish this platform with companies larger than ourselves.”
6. Windows 1.0 was only out for two weeks before it had to be patched to fix bugs (sound familiar?).
7. Windows crashes an estimated 25m times a day.
8. Windows 1.0 included a large number of utilities that are still part of Windows today – Calendar, Notepad, Terminal, Calculator, Clock, Windows Write and Windows Paint, Control Panel, and the Reversi game.
9. Support for Windows 1.0 was weak, and even Microsoft’s own apps didn’t support it. In fact, Excel and Word didn’t work with Windows until 1987 and 1989.
10. Windows 3.1 was the first stable release, which led to many hardware manufacturers preloading it on their computers. This proved to be a major turning point in Windows history and world domination.
11. Windows 3.1 (Pre-release name Janus) was released in March of 1992. In its first few months on the shelf it sold over 2 million copies (including upgrades). The Windows 3.1x OSs were groundbreaking for their time and they paved the road for today’s modern Microsoft environments.
12. Between 1986 and 1996 Microsoft’s stock soared hundredfold and it was estimated that Microsoft had created 10,000 millionaires by 2000.
13. Bill Gates earns $250 every second, $20m a day and $7.8BN a year.
14. If Bill drops a thousand dollar bill, it’s not worth his while to pick it up, as he’ll make the same amount in the time it takes him to pick it up.
15. If Bill Gates was a country, he would be the 37th richest country in the world.
16. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the wealthiest organisation for charitable grants with assets of approx $65Bn.
17. Erik Noyes from Charles Schwab came up with the phrase Blue Screen of Death “BSoD” in 1991.
18. Bill Gates scored 1590 on his SAT. Paul Allen, scored a perfect 1600.
19. The Windows operating system has 50 million lines of code (a line averages 60 characters) and grows 20% with every release. It’s put together by 7,200 people, comes in 34 languages and has to support 190,000 devices–different models of digital cameras, printers, handhelds and so on.
20. An estimated 250-300K applications have been developed for Windows.
21. Over 5 million testers signed up for Vista’s release candidates
Read rest of entry

Friday, October 23, 2009

Microsoft's path to Windows 7

Microsoft Corp launched its new Windows 7 operating system on Thursday. Here are some significant dates in the history of Microsoft and its development of the world's predominant computer software.

1975 - Microsoft founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen

1981 - IBM introduces its personal computer with Microsoft's

MS-DOS 1.0 operating system, which relies on typing commands

1983 - First version of Windows released

1985 - Windows 1.0 released, featuring bitmap display and use of mouse pointing device

1987 - Windows 2.0 released

1990 - Windows 3.0 introduced, features 16 colors and a new set of Windows icons

1993 - Windows NT 3.1 released, aimed at business computing market

Aug 24, 1995 - Windows 95 released, adds multimedia and mobile capabilities

June 25, 1998 - Launches Windows 98, aimed specifically at consumer market

Jan 13, 2000 - Steve Ballmer named Microsoft CEO

Feb 17, 2000 - Windows 2000 launched

2000 - Windows Millennum edition made generally available, aimed at home computer users with music, video and networking enhancements

Oct 25, 2001 - Windows XP launched, combines business and consumer operating systems

Jan 30, 2007 - Windows Vista launched

June 27, 2008 - Chairman and co-founder Gates retires from day-to-day role at Microsoft to spend more time on philanthropy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Oct 22, 2009 - Windows 7 released.
Read rest of entry

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Google To Launch Music Service Called Google Audio


Google is set to continue on its march towards global domination of just about any space it feels like with news that the search giant is preparing a music service called Google Audio

Google is said to be in negotiations with the big music labels, although it’s not clear whether the service will be a streaming site (such as Last.fm or Grooveshark) or a store along the lines of iTunes, reported the Washington Post.

The entry into music isn’t a first for Google, with the company already offering a free ad supported music service in China. That site has the backing on the big four, so the relationship is already in place for a push into the United States.

The other unknown aspect is whether Google will be approaching the music service as it has with books: copy them all then offer the public domain items free of charge. The idea that Google might archive the world’s music is divine for a music lover, however the music industry may not be overly amused by the idea.
Read rest of entry

Microhoo

The deal Microsoft and Yahoo made today to combine their ad and search efforts has its roots in the mid-1990s, near the dawn of the Web.

It was then Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle who made the decision that Yahoo would become a “portal,” a gateway to an internal Web world. All the smart guys in New York and in the mainstream media were urging this. Search, they said, was limited, it was techie, it was obscure. The real growth was in media.

Around the same time Microsoft decided it must “embrace and extend” its monopoly from Windows to Office to the Web, through Internet Explorer. Rather than selling what it made, it would bundle its monopoly products with its browser and dominate that way. This led to its antitrust case, and it has embraced, even extended itself into, the legal profession ever since.

So it was mistakes made long ago that created the new Microhoo. Yahoo will become the salesman and public face for Microsoft’s technology. The hope is this will slowly eliminate the technology, legal, and marketing mistakes both are known for, relying on the two firms’ complementary strengths.

That’s the theory. Many remain skeptical.

But there’s a more important lesson for you here. This lies in the nature of scaling, where Moore’s Law meets what some call Moore’s Second Law, the idea that as technology grows and scales it forces consolidation, and leads to limits on competition.

We see this in the chip market, where the number of viable companies declines as the cost to fabricate chips goes up. And we’re seeing it in search, where the increased complexity of the task means fewer-and-fewer search firms are viable.

This is not peculiar to technology. It’s true with any complex, mass-marketed product. The failures of Preston Tucker and, more recently, John DeLorean, show that the problems of scaling eventually snuff-out start-ups in the car market as well. At some point only government support can get a newcomer into the game.

In technology, however, this happens at Internet speeds.

Google, which picked up Yahoo’s rejected business plan in 1998, went in less than a decade from being a feisty start-up to one of the largest, and wealthiest, companies on the face of the globe. Now it has just one scaled competitor, along with small fry and regional competitors.

This pace is only accelerating. Any start-up must be ready for explosive growth, and hyper-evolution of the competitive environment, corporate lives measured in dog years.

Most people in the tech business understand this intellectually, but expecting it, planning for it, embracing it, those are challenges not just for entrepreneurs, but for customers and government as well.

Microhoo, uniting companies with a combined age less than my own 54 years, will now face months of scrutiny by U.S. and international regulators. When they’re finally finished, will the resulting company even be viable? Or will the growth of Baidu have made such scrutiny irrelevant?
Read rest of entry

Monday, October 12, 2009

Microsoft Launches New Phone Software

Microsoft Corp introduced new software for mobile phones on Tuesday, promising a range of devices to compete with Apple Inc's iPhone and Research in Motion Ltd's BlackBerry.

The world's largest software company, in partnership with phone makers and phone companies such as Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, AT&T Inc and Vodafone Group Plc, said more than 30 new devices with the new Windows Mobile 6.5 software would be on the market in more than 20 countries by the end of the year. The new phones can play music, open Word and Excel documents, and be synchronized over the Internet. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer played down recent industry talk that the company was developing its own smartphone. "We are not here to announce today that we are making phones," he said at an event in Paris. The market for phones is set to treble or quadruple in the next few years, Ballmer said, and Microsoft is ready to challenge other phone makers for market share. He added that Windows Mobile's share of the mobile phone market is equal to Apple's. "We and Apple are neck and neck and we're chasing the two other players," said Ballmer, referring to Nokia, the world's No. 1 smartphone maker, and Research in Motion. Microsoft also announced a new online application store, where users can buy 246 applications for their phones.
Read rest of entry

PCs Best For e-reading, No Device Planned

Microsoft has no plans to develop a digital book reader to compete with the fast-growing popularity of Amazon's Kindle or a device that rival Apple is reportedly developing.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said Microsoft had no need for its own e-reader, since it already supplies the software that runs the most popular device for electronic reading. "We have a device for reading. It's the most popular device in the world. It's the PC," Ballmer said on Thursday on the sidelines of television show recording at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. The No. 1 software maker's Windows operating system runs nine out 10 of the world's personal computers. Ballmer also said Microsoft would also be willing to work with Amazon to bring more books to the personal computer, days after the online retailer vastly expanded its Kindle reading device's global footprint to 100 countries. "I would love to see companies like Amazon and others bring their books to the PC," Ballmer said. "Hopefully we can get that to happen with Barnes & Noble or Amazon or somebody," Ballmer said. "But no, we are not interested in e-readers ourselves." E-readers are expected to be a hot gift item in the upcoming holiday season, and industry research firm Forrester this week hiked its forecast for U.S. e-reader sales by 50 percent to 3 million units. Apple is reportedly developing a new device that can work as a digital reader, and technology watchers have said Microsoft may also be considering such a move. The software maker already markets its Microsoft Reader for PC-based book reading and supports tablet PCs.
Read rest of entry
 

Labels

Blogumulus by Roy Tanck and Amanda Fazani

Geeks Tech Copyright © 2009