For the friend we loved

IF TEARS COULD BUILD A STAIRWAY
	AND MEMORIES WERE A LANE
WE WOULD WALK RIGHT UP TO HEAVEN
	AND BRING YOU BACK AGAIN

NO FAREWELL WORDS WERE SPOKEN
	NO TIME TO SAY GOODBYE
YOU WERE GONE BEFORE WE KNEW IT
	AND ONLY GOD KNOWS WHY

OUR HEARTS STILL ACHE IN SADNESS
	AND SECRET TEARS STILL FLOW
WHAT IT MEANT TO LOSE YOU
	NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW

BUT NOW WE KNOW YOU WANT US
	TO MOURN FOR YOU NO MORE
TO REMEMBER ALL THE HAPPY TIMES
	LIFE STILL HAS MUCH IN STORE

SINCE YOU’LL NEVER BE FORGETTEN
	WE PLEDGE TO YOU TODAY
A HOLLOWED PLACE
	WITHIN OUR HEARTS
IS WHERE YOU’LL  ALWAYS STAY

REST IN PEACE OUR FRIEND. YOU ARE THE BEST HUMAN IN OUR LIFE.

Microsoft revamps Hotmail

SOFTWARE GIANT Microsoft has overhauled Hotmail in an update that “declares war on graymail”.

Microsoft defines ‘graymail’ as email that is reported as spam but is actually legitimate content, such as newsletters or notifications that users have signed up to receive. The firm plans to address this problem by rolling out various tools over the coming weeks.

Graymail apparently accounts for 75 per cent of the emails that users reported as being spam.

Microsoft said in its blog, “What really characterizes graymail is that the same message that one person thinks is ‘spam’ could be really important to another person. It’s not black and white, hence the name.”

“We’re excited to announce five powerful tools to help you take control of your inbox, get rid of graymail, and keep track of the email that’s important to you.”

For starters is newsletter filtering that allows users to highlight and delete newsletters or unsubscribe from them from within Hotmail. Custom categories will mean emails can be, er, categorised rather than sent to separate folders.

Further, a scheduled clean-up feature will keep your Hotmail inbox tidy by deleting old emails or moving them to a folder automatically based upon a user defined setting. For example, it can delete all messages from a certain sender except for the most recent.

A small change is that flagged emails get pinned to the top of the inbox and stay put even when new email arrives. Emails from selected senders can be set to be automatically flagged when they arrive.

Lastly are instant actions that give users a selection of options, such as delete or flag, when the mouse is hovered over an email.

If this doesn’t sound like enough of a re-jig to get Hotmail up to speed with, say, Gmail, Microsoft said that it is “still just getting started”, and added, “We’ll have more on these features and others as they roll out in the coming weeks.”

What Facebook announced at F8 today

Facebook is rolling out some of the biggest changes in its history, unveiling its new Timeline and all-new Open Graph features Thursday, features that will radically change how users display their information, and the way they discover new content.

At F8, Facebook’s annual developers conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the two new features. Timeline, he explained, is “the story of your life,” significantly altering the way users’ information is shown on the world’s leading social network, presenting “all your stories, all your apps, and a new way to express who you are….It’s a way to tell all the important stories from your life on a single page,” Zuckerberg said.

Timeline, which went into beta Thursday, is designed to let users go back in their lives, Zuckerberg said. “It’s how you can tell the whole story of your life on a single page.”

This is an extremely significant change to the way Facebook looks. With Timeline, users will see several new sections including visual tiles, ways to get all their apps, a cover photo, and new ways to, as Zuckerberg said, “express who you are.”

To be more precise, in Timeline, all a user’s stories appear in the bottom left hand side of the page, much like their existing Wall. On the right, there’s a timeline that breaks down all posts from various points. And finally, there’s a cover photo so you can “express who you are.” The idea is that this allows users to jump back to their earliest Facebook posts.

Zuckerberg said that Timeline is already enabled for mobile devices.

In Timeline, users will be able to see everything shared recently. Users can click on a year in the timeline, and it scrolls down to that year. Years will also get broken down by month. Users can roll their mouse over a point in time, and they instantly get the option to add photos, notes, and other items.

In addition, items in the Timeline will also be posted on a map, so users can see what they’ve done. The map is by Bing, a result of the partnership between Facebook and Microsoft.]

While Timeline is only in beta now, developers will be able to access the new feature immediately.

Open Graph, Ticker

After he was finished unveiling Timeline, Zuckerberg then moved on to Ticker, the next version of the social network’s Open Graph.

The idea, he said, is to enable a “completely new class of social apps.”

Open Graph and Ticker will be rolled out slowly, giving developers a chance to create apps for Timeline. However, Zuckerberg said that elements of Open Graph that make discovering of media content like music, movies, TV, and news will be available immediately.

Last year, Zuckerberg said, Facebook rolled out Open Graph, a map of all a user’s connections in the world, and made it so users can connect to anything they want in any way they want. But now with the next Open Graph, he said, users will also be able to connect to an order of magnitude more things than ever before using Ticker, a way to express “lightweight” actions, thoughts, and other things any time they want.

When a user shares a post normally, it goes into their news feed. But when that user adds activity through Open Graph, it will go into Ticker, and into Timeline, but not into the news feed unless that’s what’s desired, Zuckerberg explained. It’s a stream of everything a user is experiencing and expressing through Facebook, and the first time the service has enabled sharing so-called lightweight activities, such as listening to a song, watching a movie, reading a book, or even cooking a meal.

And Zuckerberg said that he expects that this will enable users and others to create “a completely new class of social apps than what was every possible before,” including those about music, movies, TV, books, and any media as well as lifestyle apps that let users express all kinds of things about their life: their runs, their naps, their moods, and much more.

All told, the new feature will allow frictionless experiences, real-time serendipity, and finding patterns and activity.

Clearly, Facebook designed the new Open Graph with the intention of allowing users to easily access all kinds of media content from a wide range of publishers. That includes music, movies and TV, news, and games. On stage, Zuckerberg and guest speakers including Spotify founder Daniel Ek and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings talked about how music and video content can be easily discovered, and Zuckerberg talked about how dozens of partners will be making news stories available through Open Graph. As well, many games publishers will allow users to get easy and streamlined access to the leading type of Facebook content.

Exciting New Features with Windows 8

Windows 8 (beta) is released today. Many new features of it end up being too good that people couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. Here is a list of Windows 8 features, and these are confirmed ones, not rumors.

What’s new in Windows 8?

• The stable version will be available in 2012.
• Windows 8 will support Tablets too, just like Android and iOS. So, the mobile OS wars won’t be boring anymore.

• Windows 8 will feature a customizable start screen showing tiles of most of used apps (as in the picture above), so you don’t need to keep those shortcuts on your desktop.
• Windows 8 will support web technologies like HTML5 and Javascript. These apps will run just like the normal ones. If you haven’t experienced HTML5 yet, check out Beat The Boot, it’s a game from Google, powered by HTML5.
• Windows Explorer will get a ribbon UI just like Paint, MS Office and other Microsoft products. It will also get a ‘up’ button beside the forward button.

• Windows 8 will come preloaded with Internet Explorer 10, even though most of them might not be interested in it.
• You can integrate Windows 8 with your Live ID, this means all Microsoft products like Hotmail, Live Mesh etc will be easier to manage. Although, this is optional.
• The ‘Time Machine’ feature which is present in the Mac OS is available as History Vault in Windows 8. With History Vault you can backup important files to another drive.

• Another feature ‘System Reset’ will let you to restore system settings to default ones (factory settings). This is useful especially when you find your system unstable and unable to find which software is the culprit.
• If you’ve a Pen drive of at least 16GB size, you can run Windows 8 from it! This feature named ‘Portable Workspace’ let’s you run Windows 8 from a USB (which contains the setup files).

• Compared to Win 7, Windows 8 will take less time to boot with ‘Hybrid Boot’. With Hybrid Boot, Windows 8 keeps certain files pre-loaded, thus, it takes less time to boot.
• Another improvement in the interface section is ‘Aero Auto-colorization’, with this you can predefine the color of the elements like Taskbar, Start menu, Windows Explorer etc.

• You don’t need to use file copiers like Teracopy etc on Windows 8 as the File copying process is optimized.
• Windows 8 will support USB 3.0 which promises super fast file copying, as fast as 1 GB/ 5 seconds!
• Windows Appstore is now confirmed, this also means that installing and uninstalling apps will be as easy as pie!
• Built in PDF viewer, no more sluggish Adobe Reader. This is another feature Microsoft took from Mac OS.
• Native ISO and VHD files support, you will no more need 3rd party tools to create and manage ISO files.

 

Facebook to launch iTunes competitor

Reports presume that Facebook will be launching a music service at their F8 conference scheduled on the 22nd of September, 2011 in San Francisco. This music service will be Facebook’s competition to iTunes and will allow users to share songs through Facebook the same way they can currently share movies, videos and links. The feature would allow online music services like Spotify and Rdio to post information to Facebook pages, which is reminscent of Apple’s Ping service. The feature will be similar to the way websites can be ‘liked’ on Facebook and will reportedly work the same way Ping worked in iTunes.

Facebook will be looking to provide music streaming services instead of cloud music services. They may require users to pay a monthly subscription fee to Spotify or Rdio, but users will then be able to stream unlimited amounts of music. This is different from cloud services like Google and Amazon’s services, as well as Apple’s upcoming iCloud because these services allow users to access their private collections remotely.

Having a music service would mean Facebook would have to develop a music player specifically for the website. This would require users to log in to be able to stream music, but for non-users, the service might be available as an app. The app would allow users who work in places that do not allow Facebook log in to stream music. The idea of such a service would be to share music in a way that friends can ‘discover’ new music from each other. If users wanted to just stream music, Grooveshark would be a way to go since that does not require a monthly subscription, but Facebook’s service would add the social element that is currently not ubiquitous with Grooveshark.

Apple’s iCloud runs on Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s cloud

Apple’s iCloud runs on two services from its biggest competitors, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s elastic cloud, reports The Register.

Sources tell the site that both Microsoft and Amazon were instructed to remain mum on the iCloud deal. Amazon’s elastic cloud is already established as a go-to service for any company that wants to offload data and other resources, but the deal serves as a major validation for Microsoft’s Windows Azure.

Writes The Register: “iCloud puts Azure into a different league, given the brand love for Apple and the Apple management’s fanatical attitude to perfection. It is a “huge consumer brand, a great opportunity to get Azure under a very visible workload,” our sources told us.”

Apple is likely aiming to avoid potential iCloud outages by selecting two cloud suppliers. The company has already had the headache of dealing with outages for its MobileMe service, which relied on a single external provider. Apple is also building its own massive data center in North Carolina, which could eventually take over some of the load for iCloud.

The Register notes that iCloud is thought to be running on Microsoft’s full Azure service, which includes the Azure compute and controller features, as well as its SQL storage. Data on iCloud is being striped across both Amazon and Microsoft’s services, a process which allows iCloud to speed up data access since it doesn’t have to rely on a single disk or service. To accomplish this, Apple, perhaps together with Microsoft and Amazon, has come up with some sort of solution for easily identifying and accessing data across both services.

How Google+ users’ profile photos can embarrass employers

Experts have warned that blending personal data with professional data can cause trouble for Google+ users and the companies they belong if they aren’t careful.

Google+ is raising questions about how personal and professional information can be combined in potentially embarrassing ways for companies.

For example, if you’ve written an article or blog post for a company and you have a Google+ profile, you can opt in to a feature that allows Google+ to display your profile picture next to search results of your story or post.

And experts warn that Google+ users should be cautious about enabling this feature.

“Blending personal data with professional data can be troubling,” Live science quoted John Fairley, director of Web services and social media for Walker Sands Communications, a marketing firm, as saying.

“Your Google+ profile picture of you in Halloween costume could be shown next to a company blog post in Google search results,” Fairley warned.

However, in order for the image to be eligible to appear as a thumbnail in search results, it has to be a headshot image, which may limit the room for embarrassment.

Personal activities promoted through social media could still have an impact on the reputation of a publicly traded company, he stated.

Even if a user left an employer, cached results would still show the user’s Google+ image next to a company’s name.

“Images can show up without someone explicitly looking for information about a company, so it can cause a lot of problems for the company and the Google+ user if they aren’t careful,” Fairley added.

A Google spokesperson noted that the feature is also of interest to Web surfers in general who may be curious to learn more about the authors of the posts they read.

“People discovering content on the Web often want to learn more about its author, see other content by that author and even interact with them,” a Google spokesperson told