Tech for Lunch!

The Search Engine world is a very competitive one and when something interesting is brought to the table, everyone usually follows. Combining search results for different categories is nothing new anymore. Google has had that for a while now and Yahoo! also offers the same thing. When you search for something, at the top of the results, you can switch between the traditional results and images, news, videos etc…

Some websites like Pageflakes offer the possibility to create your own homepage which gathers information from many places. These are called Mashups and some sites even offer the possibility to present results in the same manner. This is what Yahoo Glue is all about. When you run a search on Yahoo Glue, you get a results page that is far from the traditional text results we are used to. You get a complete break down of almost everything that is available on that subject.

You can try Yahoo Glue on Yahoo! India which is where the product is being tested right now. If you run a search for Britney Spears, you will get a bunch of different results and what’s really different is the presentation. You can see standard search results, along with a biography, images, videos, news etc… naturally the sources of the results are based on the keywords you enter. For example, Britney will return some Last.FM results which would not show for Katie Holmes. If you leave the celebrities alone and search for “Adobe Flex” ( yes I know… I can’t get Flex out of my mind), you will get results for Adobe’s Stock prices and job postings for Flex programming.

I think we should be seeing Yahoo! Glue get implemented in all other Yahoo sites pretty soon because the results are very impressive and become very useful if you don’t really know where to start on a new subject.

I’m sure most of you have heard of (and probably used as well) Napster. Napster changed the way we trade, discover and, most of all, download our music forever when it was launched in June 1999. After a very successful run and a whole bunch of lawsuits and pressure from the record industry, Napster closed in July 2001. It was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Even though traffic was abundant and the sharing services were practically flawless, there were many other problems and Napster was not a very profitable business. In fact, after the final blow of lawsuits, it had to file for Chapter 11 and liquidate it’s assets.

One of the founders of Napster, Shawn Fanning has been hard at work on a new startup called Rupture: “All Games, All Platforms. Connect, Share, Achieve. Rupture builds a profile for you based on your game play. It’s not like other profiles, however. We automatically pull information from many video games. Did you beat the Drums Tour in Rock Band on Expert? All your friends will know”. Rupture has been in beta for quite some time and so a public release hasn’t happened yet.

It turns out that Shawn Fanning will finally get some payback for his hard work because Electronic Arts has been keeping an eye on the site. EA is buying Rupture for $30 million in a deal that should be announced soon. They are looking to integrate this technology in their business plan because the social networking aspect based around Massively Multiplayer games is something EA has been wanting to add for a while now.

Shawn will be working for EA once the deal goes through. Looks like setting up a few Internet Startups may eventually get you someplace cool!

Earlier this week, I wrote about GTA IV and said that they had estimated hitting the $300 million mark for the first week of sales. Well, it turns out the estimates were a little bit off and not just by a couple million! Take-Two reported that they sold some 3.6 million copies on the first day of sales, on April 29th, and a total of about 6 million units during the first week. This global sales figure amounts to a grand total of $500 million for the first week of sales for GTA IV.

For those keeping score, this is one of the most lucrative events in the history of entertainment. Last year, Microsoft picked-up a tiny $400-million during the release of Halo 3.

Take-Two recently refused a takeover offer by Electronic Arts stating that the offer was too low. This should help them get a better offer while they hold the most sought after franchise in the video game industry.

I’m very curious to see what the final numbers will be for GTA 4 at the end of the year. What are your bets?

Microsoft announced Saturday that it is withdrawing its offer to purchase Yahoo!, due to the inability of both parties to agree on an acceptable sale price.

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer said in a letter sent to Yahoo! that the software manufacturer was willing to spend $47.5 billion to acquire Yahoo, or $33 per share.

But Yahoo! insist’s that the computer giant pays at least $53 billion, or $37 per share.

The original offer of Microsoft, dating back to January 31st, amounted to $44.6 billion, or $31 per share. Yahoo! had refused, arguing that it under-valued the society.

On April 22nd, Yahoo! posted its financial results for the first quarter as being higher than the expectations of analysts. Yahoo’s earnings had risen to $542 million, or 37 cents per share, more than triple that of $ 142.2 million, or 10 cents per share, garnered in the same period last year.

Most of this improvement came from a windfall of $401 million generated by the participation of Yahoo! in the parent company Alibaba.com, an e-commerce site in China.

If it were not for the provision of Alibaba, Yahoo! would have benefited of earnings per share of 11 cents, on the whole similar to that of last year. Profit per share was still two cents higher than expected on average by analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Yahoo! has not raised its forecast for the remainder of the year. Microsoft had hopes that its bid would become inevitable if Yahoo! was unable to substantially accelerate its growth.

Microsoft had threatened to oust the board of Yahoo! of its 10 directors to accept its offer this Saturday.

Yahoo! felt from the beginning that it was worth more than what Microsoft offered, even if their share price had dropped to less than $20 at the time of submission of tenders.

Private shareholders are beginning to break silence and are publicly stating their disagreement with Yahoo’s decision to refuse the offer. Now would probably be a good time for Microsoft to come back to the table to make an offer and let the shareholders make their stand. There have been a few lawsuits against Yahoo’s board because of their position, and more are expected to appear in the coming days.

I recently said that I do not usually cover the gaming industry, but it seems that it is getting more and more difficult to ignore. Some games are just impossible to ignore and I’m pretty sure you’ve heard a little something about this franchise.

Take Two’s Grand Theft Auto 4 is most definitely the best one of the entire franchise and is out to become the best selling video game of all time. The game stands to sell an estimated $300-million during its first week and perhaps a $450-million during this year.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise has become well known for it’s immersive experience and is probably most notorious for it’s high level of violence. Many lawsuits and reports have followed the previous installments stating that the games are a bad influence for teens and make crime look like an interesting avenue. GTA4 takes it all even further, but most people will tell you that, although the game is very violent and realistic, it is not that bad an influence if you can think for yourself.

You play as Niko, a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant who gets caught up into a life of crime whether he wants it or not. You get jobs or missions from your employers and your decisions truely have an impact on the progression and the outcome of the game. Let’s say you have a choice of killing someone to complete a mission, that death could make someone very mad or very proud of you, and may bring revenge upon you or a helping hand later on when you need one. This makes for an even more interesting storyline because your experience is based on how you play the game.

The city itself is very impressive, even though it is not as huge as San Andreas was. The details and the realism are what makes it so incredible. You can see potholes and garbage strewn on the streets in a shady part of town, and compare that to the smoothly paved roads and posh stores in a wealthy part of town is like looking at any real-world city. But this goes even further with different clothing styles, different lingo and even different cars, depending on the neighbourhood. That’s what I call an incredible gaming experience!

The single player campaign is certainly very interesting to play, but the greatest addition to GTA is the multiplayer online game play. Supporting up to 16 players at one time, you can choose any one of over a dozen different match types for some thrilling action.

The reviews for this game are simply unbelievable. Almost everyone agrees that every aspect is well above every standard and sets the bar for next generation games to come. I recommend for everyone to give this game a try if you get the chance or at least just watch someone who is playing it, because it plays out just like a movie. Crime pays for Take Two.

Once again, I’ve come across a really cool online application that can be very useful to some readers out there. This one is called Presdo, which you can try for yourself at www.presdo.com, no need to register to see it in action.

Presdo takes the hassle out of trying to find the best time to get together with people. Use Presdo to minimize the annoying ping pong of email, texting, and voicemail when organizing the next team lunch or trying to grab coffee with a friend. So basically, it is an online scheduling tool that you can use to invite people to an event (as simple as a cup of coffee to anything else..) and it helps you work-out the details so that the most people can attend without conflicts.

The thing that’s really cool about Presdo, and what makes it different from some of the others, is that it uses natural language to enter your events. When you get to the front page of the site, you are presented with a Google-inspired input box and not much else. You type in what you want to do using plain english, like “have lunch with Josee and yanick tomorrow at noon” and Presdo will take you to a screen with everything already filled out according to what you entered. At this point, you can modify what needs to be modified and enter the email addresses for the people you want to invite. If you have a sign-in, you would only need to do this once and you could re-use many of the things you’ve entered previously. You can use Google maps to find locations in your area and that map is included with the event to let everyone know where to go.

Once you send our the first invitation, everyone can confirm or suggest new times and locations to better accommodate them. When everyone agrees or you have the best date/time/location to get the most people, you can save the event directly in your calendar. You can export the event as an Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar items.

Presdo works extremely well and is a free service. Eventually, the founder would like to offer a premium service.

It was thirty years ago, on May 3rd 1978, that the very first spam message was sent out. I’m not sure if this is a wonderful event to remember, but the first message was not of malicious intent contrary to the ones we sometimes get today.

Back then, the internet as we know it today was not quite born just yet.. The network was known as the Arpanet and was still government-owned. According to Wikipedia: “The ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) developed by DARPA of the United States Department of Defense, was the world’s first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet.” While I was digging around for this story I ended up reading a few documents on the origins of the internet and it’s original purpose and I’ll probably write an article about all of this later on.

Let’s get back to the subject at hand, the first SPAM message. Gary Thuerk, the guy who sent the message had to use a text-based email client (there was no Windows at that time ;-)) and had to type all of the addresses manually. Compared to today’s spam attacks, it was a very limited number of recipients. It was an advertisement (or actually an invitation to come see) for the new DEC Computers. DEC does not exist anymore, but not because of the spam. The message was sent to a whopping 393 people and was not sent without problems. The person who sent the message was not very familiar with arpanet and its rules, nor with the software to send messages. He typed in all the addresses in the TO: field but after 320 names, they started overflowing in the body of the message. The first recipients then received the email with a bunch of addresses before the actual message. When they figured out that the last 73 names had not been included in the first broadcast, they sent another one!

The response was not very friendly to Mr. Thuerk’s pioneering message. Because the Arpanet was only used by researchers and the U.S. Military, he received many replies telling him that the system was not for his business purposes. In fact, he had managed to connect one of his DEC Computers to the Arpanet, which was also a violation of the rules.

It was approximately 10 years before another spam message was sent out in another form, and the evolution of spam followed the networks. Spam was used on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), and today as we know it on the internet, where they account for about 90% of all emails sent in one day.

You can see the full transcript of the original message as well as many of the replies that followed here.

A friend of mine came across this article by Tamir Khason and sent it to me. It’s actually pretty funny to see that -probably by a lot of coincidence- there seems to be a correlation between the success of a programming language and the amount of facial hair that the inventor had :-) I’m sure we could do the same type of correlation for many other things, but this one seems to hold true in many cases and I thought it would be a bit different from my usual articles.

The best examples are for the C programming language. One of the most well known and widespread languages. Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie and Kenneth L. Thompson all have beards and have created a language which is used by approximately 16% of open-source projects.

The article then mentions another great contender, namely C++, but this language is being used less and less as time goes by. The reason for the decline of the language is the fact that its creator, Bjarne Stroustrup, had a lot of facial hair when it was released, then only had a goatee and now doesn’t seem to have anymore.

So there are two conclusions to be drawn from this: The success of a programming language is directly related to the amount of facial hair of the creator, and it’s lifespan is also based on keeping that same beard.

Mustaches are not as successful it seems. The developers of BASIC and Perl, both had mustaches and both of those languages were widespread but very criticized.

If you need to see more proof on this theory, you should really take a look at Tamir’s articles. I linked to the most recent one but at the top of his article, you will find a link to the first one that he had written. Enjoy!

There is something new brewing in the world of computing. The Florida-based company, Psystar, offers a computer that can run any operating system, including Apple’s Mac OS X.

This is the Open Computer, which is offered in two versions, the basic, starting at $399 and the Pro, starting at $999. In other words, Apple clones are now available.

Historically, the Mac community has been able to evolve in a closed environment. But starting a couple of years ago, Apple computers were equipped with Intel processors, which facilitate the lives of people who specialize in everything that surrounds the industry of cloning and copying.

Of course, Apple’s lawyers are probably already on the case. One can assume that Steve Jobs has already declared war on these new clones. In its advertising, Psystar insists that their computers allow the users to operate Macs at a fraction of the price, since the Mac basic costs at least three times as much, with far fewer components and performance.

The Operating system that you choose to install (or get installed) is up to you and Mac OS X may be a bit more expensive, but with such a low machine price, you’re still way under Apple’s prices. Theoretically though, it is forbidden to run this Mac OS X on any device other than those made by Apple.

The only potential problems I see with these are the availability of device drivers if you decide to change some hardware in your machine or add some components…and perhaps the availability of patches which might refuse to install if they notice you are not running genuine Apple hardware.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see Apple’s reaction in dealing with this intrusion into their world. Can Apple legally prevent manufacturers from making hardware that is capable of running their software?

Pinnacle, a division of Avid (editing software used in television) offers a beautiful product to the general public, the Dazzle Video Creator Platinum. It allows you to simply capture images of your VHS and video cameras in your computer and then make montages to be transferred to DVD or video to the Internet.

The software comes with a capture card. An external module that you plug into a USB port on your computer. In this unit, you plug your VHS player, your video camera or any other video player connecting with RCA cables or S-Video.

You capture, edit and you create. During the capture, the software scans the video images on your computer. Once this stage is completed, it analyzes the images and divides them into chapters (like a DVD). This will help you when the time comes to create the menus. If you want to keep the images as they are (e.g. a TV show in full or video of your marriage) simply choose the beginning and end and voila!

If you wish to make a montage (best time, remove the ads, etc..), You can choose the samples to keep and paste, reverse them and choose transitions. The editing software allows you to simply create your montage and is suitable for most people. You choose the look of thee DVD menu, it gives a name to each clip and is almost finished.

Finally, you select the type of video you want. A DVD? A Web clip(Real Player, Windows Media)? A digital file in MPEG format?

If you have added several effects, transitions and added several titles, the computer will take some time to compile the video. Burn the result to the DVD itself and you have a true DVD as the ones you rent in video stores.

The software comes with Pinnacle Studio QuickStart, which offers a capture module only. This means that you cannot do anything other than DVDs or videos to computer.

The Dazzle Video Creator Platinum is a module which does not require installation. Just connect it to the USB port of a computer and you’re ready to go.

Be aware that any kind of video editing requires quite a bit of memory and processing power so make sure you have a good enough machine to do it. This will work on older machines but it just takes longer during editing and compilation.

I’m sure a lot of you have other suggestions for video editing software, but this is an easy to use solution for those who are looking for a quick and easy way to convert video to a digital media.