Maggo Mag Theme

For those interested in taking the latest incarnation of Ubuntu for a spin, you might like to know that a release candidate of Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” is available for download a few days ahead of the full release.

• Download here
• Release notes here

Only one thing stood out in the release notes to me:

The 71 and 96 series of proprietary nVidia drivers, as provided by the nvidia-glx-legacy and nvidia-glx packages in Ubuntu 8.04, are not compatible with the X.Org included in Ubuntu 8.10. Users with the nVidia TNT, TNT2, TNT Ultra, GeForce, GeForce2, GeForce3, and GeForce4 chipsets are affected and will be transitioned on upgrade to the free nv driver instead. This driver does not support 3D acceleration.

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Adrian is a technology journalist and author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

Microsoft is getting ready to launch Vista service pack 2 in the coming months, before that it is releasing a beta version to a small group of testers.

A small group of Microsoft’s technology adoption program customers will get Vista SP2, Mike Nash posted on the windows vista blog. There is a speculation few days before that Microsoft will release Vista SP2before the launch of Microsoft Windows 7.

In addition to the previously released updates since the launch of Windows Vista SP1, Windows Vista SP2 contains other changes like support for new hardware, and several emerging standards according to Vista blog. These include Vista SP2 and Windows Search 4.0 for faster and improved relevancy. Vista SP2 also carries Bluetooth 2.1 feature pack supporting the most recent specification of Blutooth technology. Native support for Blue-Ray recording in Window Vista. Adds a windows connect now (WCN) to simplify Wi-Fi configuration. Windows Vista SP2 enables the exFAT file system to support UTC timestamps, which allows correct file synchronization across time zones.

The public release time for Windows Vista SP2 is not known yet, it may take weeks or months before we see SP2 available to download.

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Google Hindi to English Translation suggests this funny translation of “आप हिन्दी समझते है ?” (do you understand Hindi?)

Google Analytics introduced new features today. These new features includes custom reports, a data export API, advanced segmentation, multi-dimensional data visualizations and Adsense integration. The upgrade also includes an improved user and administrative interface.

The most useful feature in today’s announcement is the Adsense integration. With this feature now publishers can track the pages that are bringing more revenue to this site. “Publishers can see their revenue and impression data alongside their site traffic data in analytics”. This feature is not yet available to all the publishers, it will be rolled out in phases in typical Google style, so look for the feature in the near future.

• Discover untapped markets. Use the geographies report to determine which regions are under-represented in your site’s user base. Optimize your site’s content to attract more of these under-represented users.
• Drive high-earning traffic to your site. Use the ‘Referring sites’ report to determine where the users who are making you the most money are coming from. Focus your efforts on getting traffic from these sources.
• Delve deeper into AdSense reports. Use the visualization feature to look at trends in your site’s AdSense performance over time, or by time of day.

Copy Cat is a freeware that allows you copy scratched CDs or DVDs to take backup of those classic movies or important files stored in them. Windows copy usually stops at unreadable parts and you want to be able to copy it, at these situations Copy cat can be really useful.

Not only scratched cds or dvds but it can also copy data from hard disk are which is partially not readable. Copy Cat skips the bytes which are not readable from file and copies all other bytes, so it may not extract the whole data but it tries to extract maximum data from un readable files.

Features:

• Copies your oldest collection of CDs and DVDs
• It even tries to copy a highly damaged media byte by byte
• It gives you the option to skip the bytes if bad area found
• It is a very fast data recovery tool
• It also tries to copy damaged files on your hard disk
• Unlike Windows copy operation it does not stop the copy if bad area found

Download Copy Cat, Compatibility: XP and Vista

Microsoft is rolling out new Windows Genuine Advantage notifications for Windows XP. According to Microsoft along with the usual validation of Windows XP OS to detect stolen or fake product keys, this release will also include significant updates to detect pirated copies of Windows OS.

Looks like Windows XP Pro is the most pirated version of windows and it will effect the users of this OS. These update notifications will works like the ones implemented in Windows Vista.

After installing this version of WGA notifications, XP users whose OS failed to validate will discover on their next logon the their desktop has changed to plain background. Users can revert to their background image but the black background will reappear after 60 minutes, this will continue until users get the genuine windows OS. Also users will see notifications on their desktop system tray, you can’t click on it or do anything to it. Via ZD Net

FlyakiteOSX is a software for transforming Windows XP into Mac look alike. It changes the desktop theme of XP to resemble that of Mac OSX.

Download the FlyakiteOSX and install the program, you can customize the installation the way you want. One important feature of it is it creates a system restore point by default so at any time if you are not satisfied with the program you can just uninstall it and if you found any errors you can restore the system to its previous configuration.

After installing you can customize the FliakiteOSX from the settings, it allows you ti turn off the settings like OSX cursors, Iceman Sounds etc. If you like the Mac OSX look and doesn’t have a Mac you should give it a try.

Apart from Windows XP it also supports Windows 2003, Windows Media Center Edition.

Microsoft settled for Windows 7 as the final name for the next windows OS code named Windows 7, Mike Nash announced on Windows Vista blog. Microsoft will share pre-beta releases of windows 7 with developers at PDC and WinHEC conferences.

Windows 7 name is finalized because it is the seventh release of windows, and Microsoft doesn’t want to come with an “aspirational” name like XP and Vista for the OS.

The decision to use the name Windows 7 is about simplicity. Over the years, we have taken different approaches to naming Windows. We’ve used version numbers like Windows 3.11, or dates like Windows 98, or “aspirational” monikers like Windows XP or Windows Vista. And since we do not ship new versions of Windows every year, using a date did not make sense. Likewise, coming up with an all-new “aspirational” name does not do justice to what we are trying to achieve, which is to stay firmly rooted in our aspirations for Windows Vista, while evolving and refining the substantial investments in platform technology in Windows Vista into the next generation of Windows.

Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore “Windows 7″ just makes sense.

Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is available for download for testing from Mozilla. It brings some new features along with the features it supported since 3.1 alpha 2 release.

The new release brings some standards improvements to the Gecko layout engine, support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties. Now Ctrl+Tab tab switching shows thumbnails of the opened tabs. There are some shortcuts available to use “awesome bar” (i really hate this thing). While using awesome bar you can use shortcuts like * for restricting search to your bookmarks or ^ for searching history. To make the keywords you type match the url use @ and for title or tags use #.

Geode which i mentioned few days back is available in this release, the TraceMonkey Javascript engine is disabled by default but you can enable it using about:config command. The private browsing mode is not yet available in this release.

Check out release notes, download Firefox 3.1 beta 1.