Watch Videos on Veoh and MegaUpload sites without time limitation

MegaVideo has a time limit of 72 minutes, after that you have to wait 54 minutes to watch the video again. On Veoh site, you can only watch the first 5 minutes of the video and you have to install the Veoh TV in order to full view. These limit are very annoying when you find interesting clip but can’t watch it because of time restrictions.
But luckily, here is one bypass way which let you remove all these annoying limits very easily. For this, you only need to have the Mozilla Firefox browser and a plugin – Illimitux.
With Illimitux extension, you can watch videos on some streaming platforms like MegaVideo, Veoh or MegaUpload without any restrictions.
Follow these simple steps:-
1. First download and install the Illimitux plugin in your Firefox browser.
2. Than you need to create a free account with Illumitux in order to use this service.
3. Now whenever you watch any video on Veoh or MegaVideo site, a small box will appear at the right bottom of the screen.
4. Click the Remove Limitation link to avoid the time limit. After that, that video will open in new tab where you can watch it completely. Now you can view more than 72 minutes of video on MegaVideo and play videos longer than 5 minutes on Veoh without installing Veoh TV.

Make Your Own 'Transparent' Display

 

With a few clever photography tricks and some tweaks in your favorite photo editor, you can create the illusion of a see-through PC monitor.

 

Once you've seen some amazing pictures of seemingly transparent LCD screens, you may want to create your own optical illusion. After researching the topic, I wanted to give it a try, too. So I'm going to show you the simplest way I've found to create the effect. All you'll need is a digital camera, photo-editing software, and about an hour to produce the image.
In this step-by-step guide, I use Gimp, the free photo-editing software for Windows, Mac, and Linux; but any standard photo editor that can produce layers and perform basic editing will work as well.

Take Your Photos

Before you get started, you need to determine (and write it down for later reference) your screen's resolution. Microsoft has two online tutorials--one for Windows 7 users and one for Windows Vista users--that show how to obtain this spec.
Next, you need to take a photo with your computer screen in the frame, and another without your screen in the frame. If you're using a laptop, the only adjustment you have to make is to fold the clamshell down before taking the second shot. Desktop users must remove their monitor from the desk entirely to achieve the right effect. You should also mark the location where your monitor sits on your desk with tape or pencil. This will make it easier to restore the screen to the right spot later on.
When taking your photo, make sure that you have enough light in your environment, but avoid having a strong light source--like the sun or a bright light--directly behind you, as it could cause screen glare in your final picture, decreasing the illusion of transparency.
The other key is to be sure to take two shots at an identical angle.The best approach is to mount your camera on a tripod. If you don't have a tripod, you can create a makeshift one. To take my shots I just used my nightstand, with a few boxes piled on top of it. You should also turn off your display or give your desktop a solid color background. This will simplify the task of editing the screen in your photo-editing software later on.
When it comes time to take your final shot, you may want to use your camera flash or to be in a room with a lot of natural light. This is because both light sources help create the transparency effect in your final shot. But if you use a flash, take care to use an angle that doesn't let the flash slip onto the screen. In the experimental shot above, the shot is pretty good overall, but the flash ruins it.
Tip: Have at least two items that run beside and behind the screen. Doing so will make it easier to line up your final shot later, and it will add to the transparency effect.
After you've captured two shots that you like you can upload them to your computer. Here's how my two photos looked initially:


Tip: If you're using a laptop, try not to move the base of your computer at all from start to finish of this project. That way, the only adjustment you'll have to make will be to the screen angle when lining up your final shot.

Layer Your Photos

The first thing to do after you've uploaded your photos is to layer them. The shot with the screen should be on top, and the photo without the monitor should be on the bottom. The reason will become clear in a moment. Once you've layered the two photos, you need to align them. To do this in Gimp, select the image with the monitor in it, and then click Select, All from the menu bar. Then choose Edit, Copy to copy the entire picture. Now, go to the second photo, and click Edit, Paste As, New Layer.
At this point, you need to align the two photos by selecting Image, Align Visible Layers. Be sure to uncheck Ignore the bottom layer even if visible, and instead check Use the (invisible) bottom layer as the base.

Frame Your Screen

Next, you want to use Gimp's Free Select Tool (in Photoshop it's called the "polygonal lasso") to frame your screen. This type of lasso is easy to use since you have to create a closed shape to complete your cut. Don't use a magic wand or any other tool to do this, as you aren't going to cut out the contents of the top image; rather, the photo of your monitor is merely serving as a guide.

Move to Layer Two

Now that your cut is ready, it's time to get rid of the first layer so you can cut out the contents of the second layer. Open your layers dialog box, and in Gimp select Windows, Dockable Dialogs, Layers.
Click the eye icon next to the top layer (the image with the screen visible). You should see the image without the screen, with the selection frame that you created in the previous step over the top. To copy the selected area and create a new file, click Edit, Copy Visible, and then select File, Create, From Clipboard.

Size Your Transparency

All you have to do now is create your background desktop image. The best way to edit this part is to go into full-screen view. You should see that your new selection doesn't quite match up with the edges of the image canvas. To fix this, use the transform tool, but make sure you that have turned off the 'constrain proportions' setting. In Gimp that means making sure the link icon is broken in the transform tool dialog box.

Now, use the transform tool to push the edges of your photo until they just barely fill the entire canvas. Once you've done that, save your work (make sure you know the location of the saved image) and examine the final product to confirm that the canvas is filled.
At this point, you need to match your photo's dimensions to your computer screen's resolution. Click Image, Scale Image, again make sure that the 'constrain proportions' setting is turned off, and adjust your photo size to match your screen resolution numbers. My laptop's screen, for example, has a resolution of 1200 by 800 pixels.

Set Your Background

The moment of truth has arrived. Set your resized image as your desktop background, grab your camera and tripod and get ready to snap your first transparent photo. In person, your transparent desktop background may not look like much, depending on the resolution of your camera. But bear in mind that the finished product is your final photo--not the actual desktop image.

Take a look through your camera, and confirm that everything lines up. If you followed my earlier recommendation, several items will be running off your desktop screen--for example, a cord extending from the back of the monitor onto your desk, or a book that is partially blocked by your monitor. These items greatly enhance the transparency effect, and serve as guides for your monitor's angles. Remember to take your time, be patient, and get the best shot you can.
As you can see, my final shot didn't turn out too badly. I made a few lighting mistakes--but overall not a bad effort for a novice.

What Now?

After you've captured your final image, what you do is up to you. You can put it back into Photoshop and adjust its colors, lighting, and white balance; or if you feel that the image is good enough as is, you can simply declare victory.
Now that you've created your first transparent screen, consider posting your image on your favorite photo-sharing site or adding your work to Flickr's Transparent Screens Pool.
 


http://www.pcworld.com/article/201935/make_your_own_transparent_display.html

The Best Free Software of 2010-Video

CamStudio
 
http://www.camstudio.org
Windows
Ever thought what you do on a computer screen was worthy of being made into a movie? CamStudio will make it so, recording all your on-screen actions—even audio to accompany it—and it can turn the whole thing into an AVI or SWF for streaming via Flash. 

Handbrake 0.9.4
 
 












http://handbrake.fr/
Windows | Mac | Linux
 
Got a DVD you want to back up to your hard drive (which you'll only do if you own it so it's legal, right)? The open-source and cross-platform Handbrake will do this for you on any OS. What's more, it can convert video from the DVD, or any other digital video on your hard drive, into other formats more useful for playback.

Miro 2.5
 

http://www.getmiro.com
Windows | Mac | Linux
Version 2.5 of Miro stresses that it's an open-source HD video player and podcast collector; it gathers new episodes of shows instantly. Miro pulls HD versions when available, even from sites like YouTube, and a BitTorrent client and RSS reader is built in. Since it can download the videos it manages and plays, with Miro you can take your shows on the road when you don't have Internet access. 

The Miro Basics

1. Preview episodes of shows in the Miro Guide.
2. Click green "add" buttons to put a feeds or sites in your sidebar.
3. Feeds in your sidebar automatically download new episodes (like a TIVO).

Take a Tour of Miro

Check out these still images of Miro in the screenshot gallery. Want something more dynamic? Watch this screencast video of Miro in action. Once you've seen that stuff, we highly recommend you download Miro .

Pencil 0.4.4b
 



http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil
Windows | Mac | Linux
The flip-book animation of the modern age is on the computer. Open-source Pencil makes it simple for any hand-drawing 2D animator, beginner or experienced, to get going on some future Oscar winners. 

TeleKast 1.0.0.14 alpha
 
http://telekast.sourceforge.net/
Windows | Linux
 
If you're ready to start reading on camera, or even just for audio, you can get some help from a teleprompter. That's expensive, but TeleKast isn't. You create the script, feed it to TeleKast, and the app displays your lines in an easy-to-read scroll so you won't stumble once.


VLC media player 1.0.5
 

http://www.videolan.org/
Windows | Mac | Linux | Portable
No frills video and audio playback on any OS that works with just about any media format you can imagine (including DVD but not Blu-ray)? That's what VLC media player is all about. It can even stream media, both live from a mic or Webcam, or using pre-recorded files. VideoLAN's Wiki will take you through this programs powerful feature set.


Windows Live Movie Maker

 
 


http://download.live.com/moviemaker
Windows
It used to come with Windows XP; now Movie Maker is part of Windows Live Essentials, so you download it separately for Vista or Windows 7. This is a completely new program and ties in tightly to other Live components like the Live Photo Gallery. Another sign of Movie Maker's relative modernity: it uses the "ribbon" interface introduced with Microsoft Office 2007. For easy Windows video editing videos, it's hard to beat.

The Best Free Software of 2010-RSS Readers

Google Reader

http://www.google.com/reader/

Web | Mobile
The premiere RSS reader these days, Google Reader makes subscribing to feeds a breeze, displays them in an easy to view format, and makes posts in your favorite blogs and sites even easier to share via e-mail or the built-in Share feature.

FeedDemon 3

http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/FeedDemon/Default.aspx
Windows
A desktop app for reading RSS feeds fast, FeedDemon also knows you need to track your feeds wherever you are and thus it syncs with the view-anywhere Google Reader. Feed Demon makes it easy to tag posts for future searches, and it watches for your favorite keywords to pop up so you don't miss a thing.

New plug-in tester mimics Mozilla's

BrowserCheck, from security company Qualys, evaluates your installed plug-ins and lets you know if they need to be updated. It's identical in function to Mozilla's Plugin Check, although it appears to be far more limited in scope for now.

BrowserCheck scans your browser's plug-ins to make sure they're up-to-date, but it also requires an add-on to get the job done.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Qualys' BrowserCheck helpfully targets out-of-date plug-ins, and provides links to download updates. Oddly, the service takes a unique approach by requiring the user to install a Qualys add-on before it will scan for out-of-date plug-ins. This is likely to frustrate many users, especially in the face of Mozilla's service, which doesn't require an additional add-on and currently scans for more plug-ins than Qualys' does.
BrowserCheck's limitations are hard to brush off. It will only work with 32-bit versions of Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8; Firefox 3.0 through the current stable version 3.6.6; and Google Chrome 4 and 5. Beta versions of those browsers, as well as other browsers such as Opera and Safari, are not supported yet. Qualys checks for fewer plug-ins, limited to Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Reader 5.x and above, Adobe Shockwave, Apple QuickTime, BEA Jrockit, Microsoft Silverlight, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, Windows Presentation Foundation for Mozilla-based browsers, and the Windows OS support expiration.
It does let you know if your browser itself needs an update, and the add-on concept could prove useful down the road. Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer for Qualys, said in an interview last week that he wasn't sure how requiring an add-on would affect scan adoption. He did add, though, that there are plans to get involved in scheduling scans and other "deeper dive" scans that would require hooks into the browser that only an add-on can provide.
Although BrowserCheck's initial limitations may seem to some like missteps, Qualys isn't a neophyte to the security field. Qualys' services are used by more than 4,000 companies in 85 countries. The ability to push the service out to that many businesses alone has the potential to close off many threat vectors that might not get patched otherwise. Still, from the looks of BrowserCheck as it is now, Mozilla's service casts a wider net, and that's a key factor to preventing security breaches.

Bomb-making tips,hit list behind bloggetery closure

More details are surfacing about why Blogetery.com, a blogging platform that claimed to service more than 70,000 blogs, was mysteriously booted from the Internet by its Web-hosting company.

The site was shut down after FBI agents informed executives of Burst.net, Blogetery's Web host, late on July 9 that links to al-Qaeda materials were found on Blogetery's servers, Joe Marr, chief technology officer for Burst.net, told CNET. Sources close to the investigation say that included in those materials were the names of American citizens targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda. Messages from Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the terrorist organization, as well as bomb-making tips, were also allegedly found on the server.
But Marr said a Burst.net employee erred in telling Blogetery's operator and members of the media that the FBI had ordered it to terminate Blogetery's service. He said Burst.net did that on its own.
This past weekend, reports surfaced that Blogetery was shut down by the federal government and suggested that it was likely due to copyright violations. On Sunday, CNET reported that the shutdown had nothing to do with copyright violations and that a similar service, Ipbfree.com, a platform for message boards, was shuttered within days of Blogetery. It is still unclear why Ipbfree was cut off.
The disappearance of the sites has prompted users of each service to complain about the closures and speculate about possible reasons. Some guesses were more wild than others.

"Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom"

--from Al Qaeda Webzine

Many speculated that the FBI was using the Patriot Act to silence bloggers. But Marr emphasized that the FBI has never ordered Burst.net to stop service to any site it hosts without a court order and that the vast majority of Burst.net's communication with the federal government has involved agents serving warrants related to terrorist or child porn investigations.
"They have to go through the legal system," Marr said. "A judge has to issue an order."
Marr said the FBI contacted Burst.net and sent a Voluntary Emergency Disclosure of Information request. The letter said terrorist material, which presented a threat to American lives, was found on a server hosted by Burst.net and asked for specific information about the people involved.
In the FBI's letter, the agency included a clause that says Web hosts and Internet service providers may voluntarily elect to shut down the sites of customers involved in these kinds of situations. The Burst.net employee who handled the request erroneously believed that the FBI would want to seize the customer's server and thus the employee cut off service to Blogetery. Marr said the FBI, however, never asked for the server.
Marr said that regardless of the mix-up, Blogetery's service was terminated because bomb-making tips and a "hit list" are an obvious and absolute violation of its terms of service.
The FBI's request invoked 18 USC 2702, a portion of federal law that allows providers to voluntarily disclose information to police in some circumstances.
Under this, the FBI has the right to ask that an Internet service provider to turn over information immediately--without being compelled by a court order--when the agency has reason to believe that lives may be threatened. The request also compels an ISP not to discuss the investigation.
A source with knowledge of the investigation said that the material allegedly found on Blogetery's server is connected to an online magazine called "Inspire," which debuted recently. Numerous news outlets reported over the past weekend that "Inspire" is designed to help recruit new members to al-Qaeda and is edited by Samir Khan, a 24-year-old North Carolina man who moved to Yemen last October. According to Fox News, the title of one article was "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom."
Citing intelligence sources, Fox reported that Khan is Web savvy and his magazine represents "al-Qaeda's most ambitious terrorist recruitment tool to date."

Windows Phone 7 training kit hits beta

As Google prepares to defend itself against allegations of Wi-Fi spying, it has said very little about exactly what kind of personal data it gathered as part of its Street View project. Last week, Google also declined to provide executives willing to speak on the record about how one of the most monumental oversights in its history occurred: the inadvertent gathering of "payload" data by Wi-Fi sniffers mapping hotspots while recording street scenes for Google Street View.

But Google finally did confirm a few additional details about the type of scanning procedure it used as well as the nature of the code first written by Google engineers back in 2006. It first took responsibility for the gaffe--which only came to light after detailed inquiries from German authorities--in a blog post on May 14, and ever since then, Google critics have delighted at the opportunity the incident has provided, with lawsuits and Congressional inquiries pending.
Let's take a look at what Google has said and some of the technology issues in question to get some more perspective on Google's Wi-Fi scanning problem.
What data does Google have?
Google admitted on May 14 that it had been "mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks" for three years. Payload data is distinct from a "header," which contains mostly benign information about the network itself: The payload is the actual data that is being transmitted over the network.
That sounds bad. Theoretically, it means that a Street View car stopped at a red light outside a coffee shop could have been sniffing its unsecured wireless access point and collecting data as it traveled over that unsecured network.
However, Google's store of personal data might not be quite the treasure trove it may seem. Data sent back and forth between encrypted Web sites (password logins, online banking, credit-card transactions, or anything with https:// in the URL) would not be collected. Mobile workers signed into VPNs would also not be affected.
In addition, it's not totally clear how much data Google would be able to capture with a Street View car moving at about 25 miles per hour along the streets of cities and towns around the world. Google said the data was "fragmented," implying that piecing together any coherent image from that data would be difficult.
A company with the algorithmic and computing resources of Google could theoretically make some sense of the 600GBs of fragmented data collected over the last three years. Google already knows a great deal about your online life if you're one of the two-thirds of Americans who regularly use its search engine, but data willingly provided to the company is different than data snatched out of thin air.
How did Google get the data?
Google confirmed it was using "passive" scanning techniques to discover Wi-Fi hotspots. That means there was the wireless equivalent of a big ear on the Street View cars that listened for any and all wireless signals. There's nothing inherently wrong with passive scanning, but most passive scanners are set to not record payload data.

Google Street View cars mapped Wi-Fi hotspots in addition to taking pictures: but went a little too far

(Credit: Google)

To avoid any possibility of collecting payload data, some other wireless mapping companies, such as Skyhook (which has gotten no shortage of free publicity from Google's screwup) use active scanning. This means Skyhook's scanning equipment sends out a probe signal to determine whether any access points are in range, and access points recognize that signal and return their own message that basically says "here I am, here's how to find me, and here's how fast I can send you the Internet." This is also how your computer or phone finds an available Wi-Fi network.
Active scanning is said to scale better, but passive scanning is more comprehensive and can't be detected by the network access point.
Scanning public Wi-Fi networks has been a hobby for wireless enthusiasts and criminal hackers for years. Back in the days when Wi-Fi was just getting off the ground, "wardrivers" would locate and map public hotspots as a service, while those bent on criminal activity could do the same thing to steal data or borrow a network to conduct something illegal.
All other issues aside, the incident is yet another reminder that operating an unsecured wireless access point is like leaving your front door wide open with your jewelry on the doormat.
How could Google have let this happen?
We don't really know.
Google confirmed it uses the open-source Kismet wireless scanning software as the base of its Wi-Fi mapping program. But additional code was written by Google engineers to discard any encrypted payload data captured as part of the scanning, Google said Friday.
That additional code is what is giving Google executives a headache. Without having any inside information, Lauren Weinstein, a longtime networking expert and co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, believes this is the heart of the debacle: Someone at Google forgot to modify the software before it left a testing environment and entered a production one.
Inside the friendly confines of the Googleplex, logging all publicly available wireless data--including payload data--would be a normal way to test whether the system will function normally as data streams into the application, Weinstein said. "You want to make sure you're not going to crash things. When you're in your own environment, it's your data; you can do what you want with it," he said.
And discarding the encrypted code makes sense in that environment, because the encrypted code is recorded as gibberish that can't be used to run network diagnostics.
However, if this was what happened, code should not have been allowed out of the labs without modifying it to dump all data gathered, not just encrypted data. "A procedural breakdown of this sort shouldn't occur," Weinstein said.
Was it really a simple mistake?
Your answer to that question depends on whether you trust Google.
Those who follow the Internet industry have been noticing a troubling trend over the past several years: one in which Internet companies push the boundaries of user privacy and data collection and apologize once they're found out or the backlash can't be ignored, only to start pushing once again after the hubbub dies down.
Likewise, Google has been willing to push in areas of law that haven't necessarily anticipated the effects of the Internet and digital technology, such as it did when it decided to scan copyright-protected books under the belief it had the fair-use right to do so, rights that in that situation are not explicitly granted nor explicitly barred under copyright law.
It's not illegal to inadvertently capture public wireless data under federal electronic privacy laws, but it is illegal to intentionally do so. All of Google's public statements to this point have characterized the data gathering process as accidental. The developer of Kismet appeared to find such a basic error entirely plausible and human, and posted a playfully chastising blog item to that effect last week, pointing out how easy it would have been to change the code to make sure the software didn't log payload data.
But as the late Ronald Reagan liked to say, "trust, but verify." Google could go a long way toward clearing up any confusion by publishing a much more detailed technical explanation of how this came to be, and by publicly allowing a third party to review the code and data as promised in its May 14 blog post.
Most of this will probably come out in court hearings and congressional testimony anyway. Until then, some will think Google looks like it has something to hide.

Chrome starts learning which way is up

Google has begun work on a new item on a long list of technologies designed to make applications running on the Web more competitive with those that run natively on a machine's operating system: an interface to know which way is up.
The orientation interface plumbing is being built into the WebKit browser project that underlies Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari, according to a Google's Chrome issue tracker.
The technology would let the browser provide an application with hardware-supplied information about which way a computing device is being held, information that's particularly useful for mobile games that rely on that for a user interface. For example, tilting a device can turn it into a steering wheel or a tabletop on which a marble rolls.
Work to add orientation support to Firefox began in 2009, and Mozilla expects it to be built into Firefox 3.6
The moves reflect a major trend under way: browsers are becoming, in effect, operating systems. Many native interfaces are being reproduced in browsers, and there's broad work under way to improve browser processing and graphics abilities as well. One big difference, though: browser-based apps usually require a network connection.
Google is placing a major bet on this cloud-computing direction. Not only does it have a broad range of Web-based tools such as Google Apps, but it's also building its Chrome OS browser-based operating system whose applications run exclusively in the browser.
Browsers also are becoming more central to mobile phones and other devices such as Apple's iPad and a host of expected competing tablets.

Droid X's Wi-Fi hot spot: Boon and bane

Motorola's Droid X Wi-Fi hot spot feature is a remarkable new level of integration in a smartphone. But packing more and more high-function stuff into a small device has its trade-offs.

The Droid X appears to be a hit, with reports that it was sold out at many Verizon stores (indeed, my local Verizon store in suburban Los Angeles was sold out on the first day of sales). To recap quickly, Motorola's new high-end smartphone allows a user to create a hot spot, similar to the access point that patrons connect to when in a Starbucks. Except, of course, that it's private and it's not as fast as a typical hot spot since it's 3G--not a DSL, cable, or T1 connection.
This raises the bar for feature integration in a smartphone--not unlike when cell phone makers began to include built-in cameras. Texas Instruments (TI), which supplies the Droid X's 1GHz OMAP processor, also supplies the silicon that enables the built-in Wi-Fi hot spot, and its silicon is a big reason Motorola was able to squeeze this feature into the Droid X.
Some of the early reviews, however, suggest that putting what is, in essence, a fully-functional Wi-Fi access point inside a smartphone can draw down the battery pretty quickly.
The problem of course is that any feature-packed phone is a computational Swiss army knife (camera, GPS device, game machine, Wi-Fi hotspot), and all of these functions can potentially take a big toll on battery life. That's the trade-off. Going forward, it will be incumbent upon silicon providers and phone suppliers to make this trade-off less painful.
The challenge for Verizon (the company closest to the end user) is that the hot-spot feature is not just an extra, like a video camera, that smartphone owners get for "free." It costs an additional $20 a month for 2GB of data and will probably be used heavily by professionals on the road. And so expectations for a good user experience will be higher than they would be in regard to a standard feature. (The HTC EVO 4G from Sprint also offers this feature for $29 a month with no data restriction).
And, indeed, there is a lot of potential. Having a smartphone that can provide a mobile broadband connection for your laptop anytime, anywhere (anywhere, that is, there's a Verizon 3G signal), is invaluable. And this feature will be even more attractive when more networks go 4G and provide the kind of speeds users are used to in their home or business.

Survey: Facebook fails at customer satisfaction

Who's worst at customer satisfaction--airline companies, your local cable provider, or Facebook? Well, according to a new study from ForeSee Results, all three are in the dumps, scoring poor grades among consumers.
Released Tuesday by ForeSee Results and the American Customer Satisfaction Index, the latest annual ACSI e-business report gave Facebook a score of 64 out of 100, one of the lowest levels of customer satisfaction among all businesses measured and on par with airlines and cable companies.
When asked what they like most about Facebook, those surveyed focused on the same general theme of being connected and staying in touch with family and friends. But when asked what they like least, people offered a myriad of complaints, including privacy and security concerns, the technology behind the news feeds, advertising, the constant and unpredictable changes in the interface, spam, and navigation.
"Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers," Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, said in a statement. "At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the Web site, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience."
In response to its low standing on the index, a Facebook spokesperson told CNET in an e-mail, "We haven't reviewed the survey methodology in detail, but clearly we have room to improve. Building a simple, useful service is the best way to earn and sustain the trust people put in us. That's why we spend so much of our time and energy focused on improving the products we offer and introducing new ones. We look forward to the next survey."

(Credit: ACSI)

This marked the first year the index measured social-media sites. And beyond Facebook, the entire category fared poorly, rating an overall score of only 70 and just beating out airlines and cable TV providers. Twitter was not included, according to ForeSee, because too many of its users access it via third-party apps rather than directly through its Web site. Among other social sites, though, Wikipedia scored the highest with a grade of 77, followed by YouTube at 73, and MySpace at 63.
Looking at other tech players, Google fell 7 percent in the index but is still tops among other individual portals and search engines with a score of 80. Microsoft's Bing made an impressive debut on the index, scoring 77, followed by Yahoo at 76, AOL at 74, and Ask.com at 73, ForeSee said.
"Google may be suffering from trying to be too many things to too many people, but it still has the most loyal following with 80 percent of its users citing Google as their primary search engine," said Freed. "That said, Bing's first measure is impressive and could put some pressure on Google. The new search engine is already making gains in market share and using clever marketing and advertising to distinguish itself from the market leader."
To compile its satisfaction index, the ACSI interviews consumers based on a model developed at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. The score for each company is based on interviews with 250 different customers, totaling more than 70,000 interviews conducted each year.

Spiderman Shattered Dimensions E3 2010 Trailer [HD]

Metal Gear Solid: Rising Trailer - E3 2010

Nokia introduces 12 mega pixel camera

Requests

If you want any game please write it in the comments,I will try to post in my blog.Just leave you request in the comments section.

Adobe: Flash to take 3D graphics plunge

In a move that could keep ties with online games programmers strong, Adobe Systems is adding 3D graphics support to a coming version of its widely used browser plug-in.
The move is an important advancement for Flash, a software foundation that eases programmers' difficulties with incompatibilities among various operating systems and browsers. And it'll come none too soon: Flash is under siege by a host of Web standards, and part of that work focuses on 3D Web graphics.

Adobe plans to detail new 3D abilities coming to Flash Player.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The 3D plans came to light on an agenda for the Adobe Max conference in October. "Join Sebastian Marketsmueller, Adobe Flash Player engineer, for a deep dive into the next-generation 3D API [application programming interface] coming in a future version of Flash Player," said the agenda item for a talk titled "Flash Player 3D Future."
The "deep dive" is on the last day of the conference, so it's reasonable to expect the official news to arrive earlier--say, during the Monday keynote address on October 25.
Later, Flash Player product manager Imbert Thibault offered a bit more of a teaser in a blog post. "I tell you, some serious stuff is coming for 3D developers.
"If you are into 3D development for games, augmented reality, or just interactive stuff like Web sites, you just can't miss the session," Thibault said. When exactly the technology will arrive isn't clear, but Thibault said it is coming "in a future version of the Flash Player."
Adobe added some 3D features to the 2008 release of Flash Player 10, but they were limited--for example, 2D objects could be manipulated in a 3D space. It wasn't a full 3D environment like that you'd see in a first-person shooter game or the Second Life virtual world.
And although Adobe invested a lot of time in the newly released Flash Player 10.1, much of that was getting the software to work on hardware-constrained smartphones, where Flash is largely nonexistent today. Because Flash's interface didn't change, the version number was only a minor bump upward.
Adding a 3D interface to Flash would be a significant change for programmers, so expect a full step up in release numbers. Version 11 sounds like the right time frame for 3D's full arrival, given the significant effort under way by many players to rebuild Flash features without relying on Adobe's proprietary (albeit publicly documented) technology.

Some of what Flash can do is being rebuilt with standards including HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language used to describe Web pages, CSS, the Cascading Style Sheets used for formatting, SVG, the Scalable Vector Graphics technology, and JavaScript, the programming language of choice for Web applications. Examples of the new era coming in recent browsers include support for HTML's 2D graphics technology called Canvas and CSS's downloadable typeface technology called WOFF, or Web Open Font Format.
But the future of 3D on the Web is murkier. Major browsers, including Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome, and Apple's Safari, are being fitted right now with 3D technology called WebGL. It's based on an existing standard, OpenGL, that has wide if not universal support.
3D doesn't end with WebGL. Google is using it as a foundation for library of code to provide a higher-level Web graphics 3D interface that began as a browser plug-in called O3D.
Here's the rub, though: Internet Explorer. Although Microsoft is supporting a wide range of new standards in its forthcoming IE9, WebGL is not on the list.
"I think it's different markup," said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of IE, in an earlier interview, meaning that WebGL is antithetical to Microsoft's current "same markup" marketing push that Web developers should be able to write code for one Web page that works compatibly under all browsers.
Flash sidesteps such browser compatibility issues by providing an interface.
However, it comes with its own baggage, such as the fact that Flash elements on a Web page often are isolated from other elements and behave differently. And Flash brings stability and security concerns, as Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs pointed out in a high-profile explanation of why Apple banned Flash from the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.
Online games are a major use of Flash, as sites such as Kongregate and Armor Game can attest and as Jobs acknowledged in his letter. Thus far, however, those Flash games tend to be casual affairs; the heavy-duty blockbusters are usually written to take advantage of an operating system's native interface, such as Microsoft's Direct3D.
Notably, Google is trying to marry this native approach with Web-based methods using its Native Client technology, which lets Web applications tap into a computer's processing power.
While Flash isn't likely at least in the near term to replace games that use the native operating system, getting 3D abilities would substantially expand the range of games developers could write, bringing new depth to those for racing cars or tossing wads of paper into a trash can, for example. Support for hardware acceleration would be essential for Flash 3D graphics, especially on mobile devices with limited processors and battery life.
It's not clear which of these approaches or others will prevail, so Web developers will have to choose carefully which technology to use for new projects.
It's clear that change is in the air. Scribd opted to move from Flash to HTML5 and other Web standards for its online document business. But despite Google's ardent support for the Web standards, YouTube continues to rely on Flash as its primary vehicle for delivering video, and Google has built Flash directly into Chrome.
Adobe hasn't said when the next version of Flash Player will arrive, but here's one clue: Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch promised Flash will support Google's VP8 video compression technology, and he promised that version would arrive within a year of the May release of VP8.
Another big item likely to arrive in the next Flash Player is 64-bit support. Here again, Adobe hasn't been willing to commit to a time frame, but given that browsers are following the processor and operating system transitions from 32-bit to 64-bit, a release soon must be a priority.
Flash developers obviously have plenty on their plates. But one last thing: don't assume that Adobe is betting on the Flash horse alone. It's also getting more involved in the world of HTML and CSS.
At the same Max conference, another talk will focus on creating Web applications with HTML5 and CSS3. "Get up to speed on the latest developments in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS," the agenda exhorts. "HTML5 has become a powerful way to add interactivity and video to the Web."

Report: iPad, tablets to cannibalize 'Wintel' laptops

Sales of Windows-Intel laptops will take a hit because of iPad and tablet growth, according to research notes released by Barclays Capital.

Dell's Streak uses Google's Android operating system and a processor based on an ARM design. No Intel or Microsoft here.

(Credit: Dell)

Sales of the iPad and similar tablets will jump next year, with some of that heady growth coming at the expense of Netbooks and low-end notebooks, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing a series of research notes sent out by Barclays Capital.
Tablet sales are forecast to reach at least 15 million units this year, jumping to 28 million in 2011, Barclays said. "We believe the initial phase of the tablet surge will cannibalize a portion of the notebook category, particularly a chunk of the netbook market and low-end notebook market," according to Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes.
Right now, almost all of the tablet growth is coming from Apple's iPad, which may sell as many as 10 million units this year and is forecast to sell more than twice as many next year. Other vendors will also contribute to sales. Dell is slated to bring out a few different tablet designs in addition to the small Streak tablet, and Hewlett-Packard is also expected to follow suit with at least one tablet.
A report earlier this year by Avian Securities forecast Netbooks rising from 37 million in 2009 to 47 million in 2010. Almost all Netbooks use Intel processors and Microsoft's Windows operating system as do a large portion of notebooks sold worldwide. (Avian expects notebook sales to increase from 140 million to 180 million in 2010.)
Because of the expected surge in tablet sales, however, in 2011, more consumer-based personal computing will shift to devices using Google operating systems, such as Android, and ARM processors and away from Windows-Intel laptops, Barclays said. This is in addition, of course, to the popular iPad that runs Apple's OS.
ARM processors are already used in Apple's iPad and Dell's Streak. These power-efficient chips are expected to power a number of future tablets. ARM chip suppliers include Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Freescale, and Nvidia.

Internet appliances: The next generation

Displays

DisplayFusion

www.binaryfortress.com Free
Give each of your multiple monitors its own Windows taskbar or wallpaper, span one long wallpaper across displays, move windows to new screens with a single click, and get better overall management of your program windows via hotkeys. DisplayFusion is ready to work with Windows 7.

 DeskHedron

tokyodownstairs.blogspot.com/2008/10/deskhedron.html Free
Virtual desktops let you set up several distinct desktops on one monitor, so several apps can run simultaneously but you're presented with only one piece of software at a time. DeskHedron provides up to nine desktops, with fancy 3D animation when you switch between them.

  Edgeless

www.fxc.btinternet.co.uk/assistive.htm Free
Why let the cursor stop at the edge of your display? Edgeless lets it wrap from one side to the other, even when using multiple monitors.

  Fences

http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/ Free
Easily unclutter your desktop shortcuts and icons with Fences. It groups the items on your desktop into transparent containers you can hide or unhide at will. Works with Windows 7, too.

 MaxTo

www.maxto.net Free
On a big monitor with a lot of screen real estate, it doesn't make sense to run every application full-screen. MaxTo segments a display into regions for easily tiling windows as you see fit. It works with Windows 7.

 Pitaschio

pitaschio.ara3.net Free
Take control of how windows in Windows work. Make sure edges snap together rather than overlap, 'prevent windows from extending beyond the screen, disable special keys like Insert or the Windows key, and more.



PowerResizer

sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=258095 Free
Dock windows to the edges of the screen and when you resize them with PowerResizer, they stay docked. If you put the windows side by side or atop each other, dragging one to resize will also resize the other so they never overlap.

Switcher

insentient.net Free
Exposé on the Mac instantly shows you the desktop, or all your open windows in various views, when you invoke a keystroke combo. Switcher brings that same function to Windows, and it works with a multi-monitor setup. The utility runs only on Vista, however.



ThetaWall

www.info-svc.com/software/thetawall/ Free
ThetaWall does more than just change the desktop wallpaper at prescheduled times; it also works with dual monitors and includes a screensaver.

VirtuaWin

virtuawin.sourceforge.net Free
Add up to nine virtual desktops to your system, on computers running Windows 98 all the way up to Vista. Access the other desktops via an icon in the system tray

WinSplit Revolution

winsplit-revolution.com Free
Split your big screen into multiple smaller "monitors." Drag program windows around with the mouse while holding Ctrl-Alt to bring up a shaded area—that's the grid section that the window will snap to when released. If there are multiple targets, pick one with the mouse scroll wheel.

WindowsPager

windowspager.sourceforge.net Free
Give Windows an Ubuntu-esque virtual desktop manager. This portable app integrates with the Windows taskbar to provide 4 instant virtual screens, but you can go up to 12. Right-click any open window's title bar to send it to the virtual screen of your choice.

Disk Utilities

Defraggler
  
http://www.defraggler.com Free
Why defragment an entire drive? Defraggler is one of the few tools that allow drag-and-drop of individual files or folders for defrag work. It's free for home or business.

CrystalDiskInfo
 
 














crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/manual-en Free
Learn everything there is to know about the hard drive(s) in your PC with this utility. It supports the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) found in most contemporary storage devices.




Easeus Partition Master Home Edition

www.partitiontool.com/personal.htm Free for home use
Resize, copy, or create new disk partitions from within Windows (2000 up to Vista, 32-bit only with Home Edition). It can convert existing partitions from FAT to NFTS on drives up to 1.5 terabytes in size.

FileAlyzer














www.safer-networking.org/en/filealyzer/ Free
Learn just about every property of files on your system when FileAlyzer analyzes them. Seriously, it's a lot of info.




GParted-LiveCD
 
gparted.sourceforge.net Free
GParted is technically a Linux distro. When launched it has one goal even on Windows systems: to provide full access to hard drive partitions, letting you resize and adjust them as you see fit using a graphical interface.

Firefox 4 beta 1

The just-released first beta of Firefox 4 takes some smart design ideas from Chrome, mixes in a few of its own and throws in a few new features and snappier performance. Add these benefits to Firefox's existing world-class library of add-ons, and Firefox just might leapfrog other browsers and become the best of the bunch -- if the beta keeps progressing along its current positive path.
Firefox 4 enters the modern age
Of late, Firefox's interface has begun to look long in the tooth compared to more modern-looking browsers like Chrome and Safari. This beta changes all that.
The biggest change to Firefox is immediately noticeable -- as with Chrome, the tabs range along the top of the browser, rather than appearing below the address bar, which Mozilla calls the "Awesome Bar."
(This new design shows up only in Windows 7 and Vista, not in Windows 2000 or XP. It's also not in the Mac OS X and Linux betas, although Mozilla says it will be at some time in the future.)
The space allotted to the Awesome Bar and navigation buttons has also been reduced, giving content on Web pages more real estate and making it easier to see the titles of all pages on your open tabs. The navigation buttons themselves also been given a softer look, with rounded rather than straight edges. The overall effect is to give Firefox a more modern, more pleasing look.
The navigation buttons have also been simplified. No longer are there separate Reload and Stop buttons. Instead, they have been combined into a single button, which changes its appearance and purpose depending on whether a page is loading or has already loaded.
The tabs themselves have also been given a minor makeover. Go to a site, and a clock-like icon appears on the tab as the page loads, indicating the speed of the page being downloaded and how much has been downloaded. It's a nice little feature for those who can't abide delays and would like to have some sense of how long the page will take to load.
Like Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer, Firefox has also finally given up menus. To get at the features that were previously available on menus, click the orange Firefox button on the upper-left part of the screen, and a drop-down menu appears.
The button itself is not particularly attractive, and its bright orange color is somewhat jarring. Don't be surprised if its design changes in the future. Still, with the menus gone, Firefox has a simpler, sleeker look.
I especially welcome a small addition: a star button on the right-hand side, next to the search box, that lets you browse through your bookmarks. It's there in place of the Bookmarks menu that used to be at the top of the screen.
"Switch to tab" -- good idea, bad implementation
Firefox 4 includes a very nifty feature that unfortunately still seems only half-baked. Type text in the Awesome Bar and it searches not just your history, previous searches and sites you've bookmarked or tagged as it used to do, but also the titles of all your open tabs.
If it finds a matching result in another tab, it shows a "Switch to tab" icon. Click that icon to head to the tab. If you're the kind of person who often uses multiple tabs, you could find this feature to be a big timesaver.
Unfortunately, though, the feature leaves much to be desired and may not be of much practical use. The search results for open tabs are mixed in with your history list, previous searches, and so on. That means the open tabs often will be found very low down on the list of results -- so low that you may never see them.
Far better would be if you could tell Firefox you wanted to search across all tabs with your current search, and those results would show up at the top of the list. Another possibility would be allowing you to set options about which results show up at the top when you type text into the Awesome Bar. Perhaps we can hope for a feature like that in the next beta.
Add-Ons Manager
The Add-Ons Manager has been given a facelift, and it's a very useful one. The previous version opened in a small window that merely listed your add-ons, with options to enable, disable, uninstall or customize them if they allow for customization.
The new manager opens in a full window and gives you far more information about each add-on, including a rating taken from the Firefox add-ons Web site, the date the add-on was installed and a link to the add-on's home page.
It also is supposed to show the size of the add-on, although that doesn't appear to work in the beta, which was not able to display the size of any of mine.
When you remove an add-on, the listing for it disappears and a yellow bar appears, telling you that the add-on has been removed and asking if you want to undo the removal. To undo the removal, click the Undo button. In this beta, I was unable to get the Undo button to work; clicking it did nothing. As with the existing Add-Ons Manager, you can also find new add-ons, get themes and view and manage your plug-ins.
By the way, you'll likely find that although your currently installed add-ons are listed on the page, few if any of them will actually work with this Firefox beta. And when you click the Get Add-Ons tab in order to search for add-ons, you're brought to a page that tells you "Something good is coming!" So clearly Mozilla has plans for a new add-ons Web site that is not yet publicly available.
HTML 5
As with current versions of Chrome and Safari, and the upcoming Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4 supports HTML 5 video, which lets you play high-definition video content directly in the browser itself, without having to use any additional applications such as Flash.
This beta supports HTML 5 video with a twist, however, by using the Google-backed video format called WebM, which uses the open-source VP8 code, rather than the H.264 codec used by competing browsers. (Oddly enough, even the latest official release of Chrome doesn't yet support WebM, although the version in the developer channel does.)
In my tests, the browser played the HTML 5 videos as promised. Given that there is not yet a great deal of video content that uses HTML 5, this is not particularly important right now, although an increasing number of YouTube videos are available via HTML 5.
Speedier performance
Betas are often notorious for laggard performance, but even in this first beta, Firefox 4 is faster than version 3.6, the current release. Web pages seem to load far more quickly, and tests bear that out. SunSpider JavaScript benchmark tests on my Windows Vista PC show that Firefox 4 is nearly 30% faster than version 3.6, but still lags significantly behind Opera 10.6, Chrome 5, and Safari 5.
I tested all five browsers, as well as Internet Explorer 8, running the test three times on each, and found that Opera finished in an average of 342 ms, Chrome in 361, Safari in 377, Firefox 4 in 651, Firefox 3.6 in 901, and Internet Explorer 8 in 5,035. (Computerworld reporter Gregg Keizer ran separate SunSpider tests and got similar results overall, although in his tests Safari edged out Opera for the lead.)
It's a big improvement over the existing version of Firefox, and subsequent betas may get faster. But it's unlikely that this version of Firefox will be improved so much that it rivals Opera, Chrome or Safari for speed.
Changes under the hood and what's next
In addition to what you see, Mozilla says that it's also made a number of changes under the hood, such as better crash protection. When a tab running an Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime or Microsoft Silverlight plug-in freezes or crashes, your other tabs will still work -- and the crashed tab can be reloaded to see if it will work this time around.
Mozilla also claims improvements in its handling of CSS that will make pages load faster and allow designers to build better-looking pages. It also touts its implementation of the WebSockets API, a tool for bi-directional, full-duplex communications between the browser and the server, to allow developers to better build real-time Web applications such as for gaming.
Mozilla also says that upcoming versions of Firefox 4 will allow settings, passwords, bookmarks, history and open tabs to be synchronized across multiple devices, including smartphones. There is an add-on from Mozilla called Firefox Sync that does this, but I was unable to get it to work properly with Firefox 4. Mozilla also promises that Firefox will be even faster, and that there will be new privacy controls.
The bottom line
This first beta of Firefox 4 is impressive, modernizing what was becoming a very dated-looking browser. The new interface tweaks make the browser sleeker and simpler to use. It's also good to see Firefox speed up, although it still lags behind Opera, Chrome and Safari.
But the browsing experience is about much more than speed. Let's not forget Firefox's vast library of useful extensions and other add-ons, which none of its competitors come close to. While many of these add-ons don't work with the current beta, most of them will by the time Firefox 4 ships, and that gives Firefox a huge advantage over other browsers.
I have used this beta without a glitch, although the usual caveats hold about not using beta software on a production machine. However, this beta is stable enough that if my favorite add-ons worked with this version of Firefox, I'd use it as my main browser today.