Monday, December 28, 2009

Cool New Calculator in Windows 7

We all knew windows always have calculator but windows 7 has bit more to offer. Lets see it

Basic Calculator

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Scientific Calculator

 

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Programmer Calculator

 

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This one is cool, you can do your digital calculation Binary to Hex, Or, Xor Operation…

Statistics Calculator

 

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Now we are done with 4 new types of calculator lets see what all new features it offers. They have made calculator to be useful in our day to day life

Unit Conversation

No More googling for these stuffs

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Other Options

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Date Calculation

We can find date difference, you age etc :)

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Add or subtract between dates :)

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Worksheets

This is yet another cool tool to calculate

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Mortgage calculation

 

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You can calculate monthly payment, Down payment, No of Years and Interest Rate

Vehicle Lease

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Fuel Economy

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You have this in both KM and Miles.

So looked at the new calculator in Window 7, they still have lot to offer, Go grab one soon

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Top 5 Tech Company Blunders

hancock title

1. Real Networks & Philips Rejects IPOD Offer

Apple’s Ipod was actually a brainchild of Tony Fadell. He started a company called “FUSE”, which was electronics company. One of his device idea was to create a small Hard Drive Based Music Player. How ever FUSE was failure, to raise fund for company, he started creating device for other companies. He approached Real Networks real player  with his IPod idea, but Real Networks has rejected the idea, then Fadell Approached philips logo but Philips too dropped the idea. The Fadell approached Steve Jobs, who immediately took up the idea, but Steve Jobs was the one who designed the IPOD user interface. The Fadell idea was to provide a Sleek, small and a content delivery system for the customers to fill their pods in a easy way.

ipod

Result : Apple controls over 80% of Digital Music world, with ITunes and No need to mention about IPod sales. Real Networks is still the same old player in Streaming  Media world, whose revenue where only fraction of Apple’s IPod and ITunes profits.

2. Yahoo Rejects Face book offer

In 2006, Face Book was about to be acquired by Yahoo for a whopping $1billion, but by then Face Book was only 2yrs old and had around 8 million users when compared to MySpace who has around 100 million users

04-Mark_Zuckerberg-Facebook 

(in picture Mark FACEBOOK CEO)

After the deal came to light, Yahoo’s share reduced by 22% overnight, then Yahoo then CEO Terry Semel cut down the offer money and proposed to by Face Book for $800 million, Face Book refused and the deal is dropped

yahoo

Result : Face Book has around 250 Million registered users and almost worth $10 Billion and Yahoo is still waiting in the bench, whether Microsoft will Buy it or not

3. Xerox Throws Alto and apple create MAC

Way before Windows and MAC exists the world had a wonderful personnel computer called XEROX ALTO, which runs on their own operating system.

170337-xerox_alto-wikimeda_180 Xerox Alto is the world's first computer with a window-based graphical user interface, a mouse, a Ethernet card and WYSIWYG text processor in 1973. By then PC market does not existed hence they dumped the technology. Until in 1979 Steve Job visited the XEROX PARC and used those GUI and mouse in APPLE LISA by then XEROX was on abandoned the ship mode and left ALTO. After Apple’s success, they realized their costly mistake and released XEROX STAR buy then it was too late

Result : Apple took from XEROX and MICROSOFT indeed inspired from APPLE and rest is history, we cannot imagine a world without Mouse, Word or Windows and computers.

4. The Search engine Before Google

Now Internet Search war was going between Microsoft’s Bing and Google. Let’s hope Bing wins.

Way back in mid 1990, do we had search engine, the answer is Yes. it was called as Open Text Search

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Open Text indeed had the logic of now Google’s search based on Back links not on the frequency of search. By 1995 Open Text Corp. claimed that it had indexed every word on the roughly 5 million documents that constituted the Web. In I995 they merged with Yahoo and after two years they abandoned the Open Text Search engine and moved their business to Enterprise Content Managent.

Result : In 1998 “BackRub” was formed, puzzled its the first name for Google, then Google was formed. The rest is history.

5. Microsoft Saves Apple

when I first read this, My reaction was “what??”

Everyone knows Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, but very less know he was fired from his own company in 1985. Since then Apple’s MAC sales had lot of ups and down, Around 1996, Apple was almost to be collapsed, then Steve jobs rejoined the Apple as advisor and negotiated a deal with Microsoft worth $150 Dollars

“Microsoft agreed to release MS OFFICE (Netopia) for MAC for next 5years as they do in WINDOWS and then All MAC OS should have Internet Explorer as a default browser”. The whole MacWorld bowed Steve Jobs for this move.

microsoft logo

Result : Steve Jobs became Interim CEO of Apple and then CEO, then he merged his NEXT OS with MAC and released Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The IPOD, the ITunes etc(the list goes on) Apple once again raised from the death bed.

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The Actual winner is customers, Apple was still alive and they are still competitor to Microsoft. what would have happened if Apple was killed by Microsoft, we would have a WinPhone nstead of IPHONE and WinTunes instead of ITUNES lolz.

Classic One

This one is special. In 1980, when IBM was interested in making PC, it’s first contact for making DOS Operating System was not Microsoft, Indeed Bill Gates suggested to approach Gary Kildall of Digital Research, author of the CP/M operating system.

Kidall was busy with some other project and fly away for attending some other project delivery. so he let his wife to negotiate deal with IBM but the deal was a failure.

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Then IBM approached Bill Gates to create a new OS, then came MS DOS, which is indeed based on Tim Paterson's Quick and Dirty operating system (QDOS), which was itself based on CP/M.

Before DOS, Microsoft's biggest products were versions of the BASIC programming tool. After MS DOS, rest is history

microsoft logo is born ;)

Disclaimer

I came across a article in PCWORLD, just sharing those in this blog space

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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Opera Mini 5 Browser : First Cut

The Browser wars does not stop in Desktop Arena it’s continuing in Mobile Phones too and the latest one in town in Opera Mini 5 Beta Browser.

Opera 4.2 was most successful Mobile Browser for All Java Based Phone, NOKIA , BlackBerry etc, now Opera Mini 5 is trying to compete with all touch screen phones and other browsers like Mozilla's Fennec and the Skyfire browser. Let’s see it’s new features

Desktop Like Speed Dial

Now Opera Mini 5 Beta offers the same look and feel of Speed Dial which exists in Opera 9 or Opera 10 Desktop web browser, this is really a great feature indeed, Opera Mini 5 will offer you a small snapshot of the web page

mininewuiPicture : New Speed Dial Option 

Tabbed Browsing

This is really a cool feature now Opera offers tabbed browsing in Mobile Phones too, This feature is highly successful with touch screen phones but they have Keypad navigations too for other phones. Tabs allow users to browser several sites simultaneously. This helps users easily jump from one page to another with the

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Picture : Tabbed Browsing in Normal Java or Keypad phone 

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Picture : Tabbed Browsing in Touch Screen or Blackberry phone 

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Picture : Web Page Showing New Page Option 

Password Manager

Now we get a cool password manager with new opera Mini 5, automatically stores passwords in the mobile phone in Opera Mini  virtual memory bank. But I personnel feel this feature is dangerous what happens if my mobile phone is lost???

Copy & Paste Feature

This best loved feature of windows Copy & Paste is now available in Opera Mini 5, what else we want its really a great feature for a mobile browser to have this option

keypad-nyt-copyPicture : New Copy & Paste Option 

The BlackBerry scoop

Opera offers a special version of the Opera Mini 5 beta for BlackBerry. Designed specifically for BlackBerry devices, Opera Mini 5 works seamlessly with BlackBerry, including opening links and copy-and-paste functions. 

Touch Screen & Keypad

We have new feature for Touch screen phones with a keypad

touch-nyt-findinpage Picture : New Touch Screen Keypad

Includes new cool touch screen settings and find in the page options etc

To download Opera Mini 5, visit m.opera.com/next from your mobile phone browser and download the Opera Mini 5 installer specific to your phone. This will install as separate software so your phone can have both Opera Mini  4.2 and Opera Mini 5 Beta for you to explore the options