Kmail developed by Freedman, an e-mail system based on Kromofons which is a new alphabet where each letter of the alphabet corresponds to a color, allowing messages to be embedded in color images. People can send messages from their Kmail accounts, which are generally read by recipients as plain text. But if a Kmail user receives a message in his account, the message appears in the color alphabet. It's really so fun and different to read our mails in such way.
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Technology proceeds at such a breakneck pace that sometimes it feels like we're rocketing into science fiction territory's like Animal cloning, unmanned aircraft and space tourism are all recent realities. For some, though, invention isn't moving fast enough. Check out the 15 amazing things we wish someone would invent.
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A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. We have probably seen them colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of in most of the Web registration forms. About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? and this is 'reCAPTCHA' does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
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Smartphone spying is where dark-souled hackers with bad intentions use readily available technology to track every move we make with our cell phone, Bluetooth or personal digital assistant. As more and more devices are synchronizing, more and more people are loading data and corporate information, and malware attacks are going to go through the roof. From identity thieves to corporate raiders to jealous boyfriends, the world of smartphone spying is open to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of digital technology and the hundred bucks or so it takes to buy eavesdropping software on the Internet.
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Mobile codes are codes in the same way as ordinary barcodes are, but their matrix structure can hold more information. Now we too can create our won mobile code with a few simple clicks to write a message, your phone number, or a link to a website and change it into a mobile code, which can be scanned using a camera phone. Simply start typing away the text you want to convert and watch the mobile code being generated instantly. Once done, name it in any way you want and scan, print or save it for sharing the way you choose best.
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For marking the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, Wired Magazine wants to see proof of the star wars fanhood. It can be an art, snapshots of your DIY creations, pictures of you in star wars costume, collector's items related to Star Wars, which will be posted in a front page photo gallery. Visit Wired News Star Wars Submissions on Flickr to upload your pictures.
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YouTube conducts a competition, titled "YouTube Sketchies", for nine weeks. Just create your original video around 3 minutes in length and upload it to the Sketchies Contest page. Your videos will be judged by a panel of Hollywood experts. The last date to submit your best comedy video is May 31st.
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Tribler is a social community that facilitates file sharing through Peer-to-Peer network. When the tribler program is started it will automatically start searching other users that have tribler running on their computer. When a connection is established it starts exchanging information. First it exchanges personal information, such as our avatar picture, our friends list, download history and information about files that are available in the network. These files can be personal, shared files, but also files that one has received from another person. Information about the discovered files and persons is available in the Tribler program. By browsing through the files and persons each user can find their prefered files and users.
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Computer criminals are evolving their tactics to subdue our computer. Each time we invest more money and time in staying safe, the bad guys just find another way around our defenses. Their newest method may be the trickiest yet, Web pages booby-trapped with infectious computer code. While the consumer browses content normally, a computer virus or Trojan horse program is silently installed. In a study, Google found 300,000 Web sites laced with such malicious code, and another 700,000 suspicious sites.
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Pencil is an free and open source animation and drawing software for Windows and Mac OS X. It lets us to create traditional hand-drawn animation cartoons using both bitmap and vector graphics. Its main purpose is to make traditional animation. It is intended to be a simple program enabling anyone to make 2D animation.
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Lego's Mindstorm NXT robot construction kit offers endless possibilities for creative play, but it may be just a bit too complicated for adults. Using the 519-piece kit to assemble and program robots that can catapult Lego bricks, fill a dog's food bowl, and play Twister.
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Twitter is the current favorite when it comes to instant presence, But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It may be getting all the buzz, but there are other services that offer similar features, and take advantage of the same underlying concepts like 3jam, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Jooopz, Jyngle, Loopnote, Pinger, and Swarm-it.
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PCWorld came up with 15 common myths in the tech world and did some digging to reveal the real story. Some rumors are wholly bogus. Others turned out to have more than a grain of truth in them. To give us a sense of how real these myths are.
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According to a 2007 ranking of the most desirable employers by researcher Universum Communications, compiled from a survey of 44,064 U.S. undergraduates. Asked to list their ideal employers, students favored organizations where they felt they could make a difference.
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In some countries outside of the US, Citibank has a login option to enter our PIN by clicking on the display of a keyboard rather than with the physical keyboard. Perhaps the idea is to defeat keyloggers, but a researcher has demonstrated that it's easy for malware to capture the PIN anyway.
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iPods can cause cardiac implantable pacemakers to malfunction by interfering with the electromagnetic equipment monitoring the heart, according to an recent study. The study tested the effect of the portable music devices on 100 patients, whose mean age was 77, outfitted with pacemakers. Electrical interference was detected half of the time when the iPod was held just 2 inches from the patient's chest for 5 to 10 seconds. The study did not examine any portable music devices other than iPods, which are made by Apple Inc.
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Everyone knows that the company computer is for work and not for surfing the web or playing games. We can't type things into this electronic box all day long without taking little breaks here and there, maybe even play a couple of levels of a game. Here are Top 5 games to play at the office.
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BlogSigs allows us to easily and automatically include the title of our latest blog post in our email signature so that we can drive more readers to our blog. BlogSigs works with GMail, Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail.
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Sun Microsystems announced at JavaOne conference in San Francisco that Java Standard Edition [SE] 7 will feature a "superpackage" capability for improved distribution of small pieces of software. It's new JavaFX technology, featuring a new runtime that enables deployment of visual applications from the desktop to devices, will be expanded beyond the current JavaFX Mobile, for deployment on phones, set-top boxes or in-dash displays in cars. JavaFX Mobile is built on top of a Linux kernel.
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InformationWeek has listed down the 12 most important programs seen since the modern Internet began with the launch of the Mosaic browser in 1993:
- Apache Server
- AltaVista
- Craigslist
- The Well
- eBay
- Amazon.com
- XMLHttpRequest object set
- Wikipedia
- World Of Warcraft
- Hotmail
- Digg
- AOL Instant Messenger
I feel the list misses few others. Check out our list, and see if you agree.
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Laptops, PDAs, Web 2.0, MySpace and YouTube. Are you the kind who can't live with them ? If you can't live without your high-tech gadgets and gizmos, and you're an active user of Web 2.0 technology in particular, you may be what a new study calls an Omnivore, a "voracious" user of technology. A new study released this week indicates that widespread access to communications technologies has led to widely varying uses of Web 2.0-type expressive and social networking activities. The study defines Web 2.0 as people expressing themselves online and participating in the commons of cyberspace.
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Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, has taken Firefox from nothing to a $US55million per year business. According to her, Firefox is just at the beginning of its life cycle. In an one to one interview with APCMag.com, she talks about where Firefox came from and where it’s going.
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Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Admit it we are fantasized about soaring through the sky like Superman or swinging from building to building like Spiderman. Unfortunately, superheroes exist in only comic books, cartoons and movies. But with scientists apparently drawing inspiration from the comics they read when they were kids, the line between science fiction and science fact has become blurred. Superheroics suddenly seem like a viable career option. Checkout how we, too with today's technologies, can spin webs and get superhuman strength.
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Sometimes bad email happens to high-achieving people. Richard Phillips, an IT specialist at the London law firm reportedly sent his secretary an e-mail demanding she pay the £4 dry-cleaning bill he incurred after she spilled ketchup on his pants. The secretary chose to forward the e-mail to colleagues, and Phillips soon became tabloid fodder as "Ketchup Trousers." For most of us, common sense and good values keep such problems at bay. But there are plenty of gray areas when it comes to e-mail, and even sensible executives the ones who stayed awake in the HR training sessions can be tripped up by an unintended nuance or other inadvertent slip. Fortunately, following a few surprisingly basic rules can help.
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Just few days back, Google has branded it's “Google Personalized Homepage” as 'iGoogle'. The logo which Google used for 'iGoogle' looks very surprising :) to me and mostly similar to the one I have designed during my
Google Interview in 2005.
Look at the similarity in the font usage and patterns used for the character 'i' in their logo.
Google's new iGoogle Logo:
My 'I love Google' Doodle created in 2005.
Does Google Copied My Logo?, I think it may be an coincidence or what you feel?
Modern robots can respond to emotion and the smell of fine wines. Discover Magazine listed out the 20 things we didn't Know about robots:
- “Robot” comes from the Czech word robota, meaning “drudgery,” and first appeared in the 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots [R.U.R.].
- The first known case of robot homicide occurred in 1981, when a robotic arm crushed a Japanese Kawasaki factory worker.
- More than a million industrial robots are now in use, nearly half of them in Japan.
- Archytas of Tarentum, a pal of Plato’s, built a mechanical bird driven by a jet of steam or compressed air—arguably history’s first robot—in the fifth century B.C.
- Leonardo da Vinci drew up plans for an armored humanoid machine in 1495. Engineer Mark Rosheim has created a functional miniature version for NASA to help colonize Mars.
Checkout the other interesting factors about robots.
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Dell announced it has selected the Ubuntu distribution for its new Linux desktop machines. When Dell asked which distribution of Linux Dell should prioritize on, Ubuntu was the most requested option. It will offer the latest Ubuntu 7.04, as an option on select Dell consumer models in the US in the coming weeks.
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Twenty-five years ago the Internet as we now know it was in the process of being birthed by the National Science Foundation. Since then it's been an information explosion. From e-mail to eBay, communication and shopping have forever changed. Checkout the top 25 things that shaped the Internet.
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