SOFTEKNEWS
Simple and Easy
Microsoft Customer Action Day
Jan 22nd
Customer Action Day aims to help victims of conterfiting software make the difference between a genuine and a counterfeit version of Windows. In the past two years, the number of customers complaining about being victims of software piracy has grown.A big percentage of the PC users, use a non genuine copy of Windows. This should not discourage those who have license!In many cases, when they download or unknowingly purchased counterfeit Microsoft products, they are exposed to viruses and malware. Viruses and malware can lead to identity theft, loss of data or more. Besides the fact that non genuine software does not provide reliability and security, if you are cached you might have to pay a higher price then the price of the license. So, why should you bother using counterfeit software and expose yourself to all mentioned, when you can get all the good stuff in one single operating system. More information about how to protect yourself against counterfeit software and where you can report it, check the official How to Tell page.
Google Dictionary
Jan 22nd
Google released a Google Dictionary that you can access by google.com/dictionary. The interface is very clean, very user friendly and offers a quick explanation of the word you search for and the synonyms of the word. It also lets you Star words and keeps a search history.
For some words you have images aswell. The feature that I loved is the option to choose from different languages and it will translate your search to that language. The web definitions are mostly from http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn or wikipedia.org, I don’t know how relevant the last one is.
New Microsoft Business Intelligence platform
Jan 21st
Among Microsoft Business Intelligence platform you can find the following product available as a free download: SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP, SQL Server 2008 R2 Express, SharePoint Server 2010 Beta, Office 2010 Beta and PowerPivot for Excel.
SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP and its technologies provide companies with a trusted, scalable, easy to manage database platform, help gain rapid insight, lowers the cost to extract, analyze and correlate streaming data. Detailed description, download options and installation steps of all the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform products, can be found here.
Google and real time search
Jan 21st
Google announced today that in the following days they will roll out a new feature to Google search.This feature will be visible in the built in Latest Results section where the information is pulled in real time and refreshed as more results come in from sites like Twitter. They also have a partnership with Facebook and My Space to get information from those sites. For Facebook it has to be a public page and it will be indexed, for My Space also only public updates will appear in search results. On the following video released by Google you can see how it will work. Link
Pay for news
Jan 20th
According to the survey that the Boston Consulting Group, a global management consulting firm, has done, people are willing to pay for news online. After the research they have done in USA, Australia and some major EU countries the results show that we would be willing to pay for online news reporting, if it would cover local news or specialized coverage, continuous news alert service and to be accessible on a device of choice.
At some point I had the feeling we would be willing to pay for Twitter and some twitter client on our iPhone, exactly my point. It is done already, it is functioning and it is mostly free. As the survey results has shown, people are willing to pay just as much as they are willing to pay for an application for the handheld devices. I’m not even convinced of this fact, it might be that some people would pay, but not enough for the “big guys” to make real money out of it, and why would we pay? Information is constantly surrounding us, more and more daily. The information we receive trough tweets, on sites as huffingtonpost.com, and hundreds of independent blogs created by news reporters More >
Microsoft Browser Choice
Jan 20th
In near feature Microsoft will deliver Browser Choice for users of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. The impact will be in all EU countries, except: Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. This means that every user of genuine or non-genuine software will receive an update through Windows Update or Automatic Update that will allow them to choice what browser to use. There will be 12 browsers from which to choose, ordered in a top 12. To see the browsers that will be included click here. The update will be “High Priority” for Windows XP and “Important” for Windows Vista and 7. To make sure you will get the update when available, set your PC region settings to one of the 32 EU countries.
If you have selected China for example, you will not receive the Browser Choice update. To set the PC with one of the impacted countries: For Windows Vista and 7 users: go to Start and type in the search field ”Change Location”. For Windows XP users: Control Panel→ Regional and Language Options→ Regional Options.
After you install the update a shortcut will be placed on the desktop and you will be able to More >
Install Windows 7 by using an Upgrade license
Jan 19th
You probably already know that no matter if you have XP or Vista, you can upgrade to Windows 7. If you have XP, you can only do a custom/clean install no matter if you buy an FPP/Retail license or just the Upgrade. If you are a Vista user, you can do both upgrade and customer/clean installation. The Upgrade option keeps your files, settings, and programs from your current version of Windows. Custom installation can be done in three ways depending whether you have a free-dos PC, you want to format the partition or you don’t want to format it. Later on I will make a tutorial about this but right now I will only explain how you can install Windows 7 with an Upgrade DVD.
Lets say you have an XP or Vista preinstalled, you purchase an Upgrade DVD of Windows 7 and you want to install it by choosing the Upgrade installation option. There is a trick for making the installation work. You will have to do an upgrade over an upgrade.
The steps are as followed: Presuming you already formatted the XP/Vista partition and chose Upgrade, you will get to the end of the installation and activation will More >
What are we playing
Jan 16th
PSP
LittleBigPlanet On PSP we are enjoying the fun LittleBigPlanet that offers total entertainment and a little jump out of the real life. The little sack guy is funny, easy to control and the graphic is beautiful. You have a lot of options for customization which makes the little guy more funny.The tasks are not always easy, but challenging and intuitive. No big fight scenes and difficult controls that you forget, it is pure fun. I highly recommend it.PS3
Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines The graphic of the game is amazing and the story is good. When you feel like jumping, running and having good graphics while you do it then this is a perfect game for you. The controls are good, not hard to remember. What I didn’t like is the empty street, or the clueless people in the game. It takes some getting used to and it’s not by any mean GOW but it’s still a good game and I recommend it for the fans.iPhone
LineUp It’s a game where you just tap tap the blocks with same color, recommended when at work and bored, or waiting in line and bored.
What are we following?
Right now we are officially More >
Playing .mkv files on PS3 trough DLNA.
Jan 10th
DLNA type of connections is not supporting .mkv right now, at least not obligatory and in this way a lot of companies hide behind the DLNA “limitations” and simply don’t let some formats to go trough, or be recognised by their products. One of the file formats is the .mkv, in this case the problem mainly is because the audio file is DTS and this needs to be converted in AC3. One of the easiest solutions is to use mkv2vob, it is a software that will demux the files into x264/DTS streams, than convert the DTS to AC3 and remux them. This process takes up about 10-15 minutes for a 6GB movie, so I would say it is a good time for such a large file.
For streaming trough DLNA I’m using a Windows 7 PC and WMP12 as the Media Server. Once converted it works perfectly. When you first Download mkv2vob go to the configuration panel and make sure you check “Always Transcode DTS”, if you don’t check this the sound might not work properly or at all.
