How to Get Yahoo's Next-Generation Webmail

Spectacular" isn't too gushing a description of the new version of Yahoo Mail--with its drag-and-drop interface, it's one of the most highly-evolved, desktop-like browser based services yet.

But there's one teensy problem with it: Unless you're one of the users who Yahoo invites to try it out, you can't get it, since it remains a closed beta. At least that's what I thought. But the Google Operating System blog has published a clever trick for upgrading from the old Yahoo Mail to the beta--and when I tried it, it worked. Here's the process in a nutshell, assuming you already have a Yahoo Mail account and are logged in:

1. Click on Options on the right-hand side of the screen.

2. Click on Account Information on the left-hand side.

3. If you're prompted for your password again, give it.

4. Click the Edit link next to Member Information.

5. Scroll down to "Preferred Content" and click on your current choice (which, if you're reading this, is most likely English). On the next page, change it to Yahoo United Kingdom, Yahoo France, or Yahoo Germany. Click Finished, then click Finished again.

6. On the next screen, you should have an invitation to try the beta--click on it, and you're good to go. And you can go back and change your Preferred Content back to whatever it was in the first place.

If you try out the beta--which is also a basic-but-handy RSS reader that knows about any feeds you've set up in My Yahoo--come back and let us know what you think. If you're not a fan, you can revert back to Yahoo Mail classic...but I'm not sure why anyone would. (The beta can be a tad slow--which might be one reason why it's still a beta--but I've never found its performance to be completly unbearable.)

source:pcworld

Gates vague on web freedomCorrespondents in Seattle

APRIL 20, 2006

BILL Gates' cryptic remarks on internet freedom at a lunch for Chinese President Hu Jintao underscores the ongoing sensitivity of the issue."This new era of an internet-based economy also presents new challenges to us all," Mr Gates said in a speech that preceded Mr Hu's address to a lunch for the visiting Chinese president.

"It is my belief that industry and government around the world should work even more closely to protect the privacy and security of internet users, and promote the exchange of ideas, while respecting legitimate government considerations," Mr Gates said.

Mr Gates did not discuss what "legitimate government considerations" would include.
Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos later declined to explain what Mr Gates had meant or reveal whether Mr Gates had raised the issues of internet censorship with the Chinese leader on the first stop of Mr Hu's official visit to the United States.

But former Washington state governor Gary Locke and Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said that no one had raised the issue of human rights with Mr Hu during the two-day visit in the Seattle area.

China's government routinely jails people for posting politically sensitive essays online, including those critical of the Communist Party, and regularly shuts down or censors websites for sensitive content, including any mention of Taiwan independence or the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.

Microsoft and search engines Google and Yahoo have all faced criticism for doctoring content on their Chinese services and products to suit Beijing's strict censorship rules.
Yahoo has also faced international condemnation for providing information to authorities that led to the jailing of two online dissident writers.

Source:australianit.news.com.au

Google Launches Google Calendar

Web calendar service, formerly code-named CL2, is now live.
Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google today launched a new Web-based calendar service that will let users add meetings and events using their own words. Dubbed Google Calendar, a beta version of the service is live and available here.

In development for "several months," the service initially will be integrated with Google's Gmail e-mail service, according to Carl Sjogereen, a Google product manager. (Go here to read what Harry McCracken, PC World's editor in chief, thinks of the new service.)
Bloggers have been speculating about Google's possible entry into the calendar space for more than a year, and some believe that the search engine giant's involvement could spur a flurry of Web calendar development.

"I sure as hell hope they do it," wrote Yahoo engineer Jeremy Zawodny in a February blog posting last year. "There's been so little innovation in the world of on-line calendars these last few years. Perhaps Google getting into the act would finally change that."

Long-Term Plans?
Google's Sjogereen was circumspect in discussing the company's plans for Google Calendar. He declined to say what, if any, connection the project might have with the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite that Google has backed, but he hinted that Google Calendar could be integrated with things like Google's personalized home pages. "Gmail is the main integration point for now, but you can imagine integration with a number of other Google properties," he said.
Last October, Google and OpenOffice.org's sponsor, Sun Microsystems "agreed to explore opportunities to promote and enhance" various technologies, including OpenOffice.org, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office.

Gmail and Calendar to Work Together
Gmail will take advantage of one of the most interesting features of Google Calendar, its ability to understand language and to quickly create calendar entries. "We do our best to determine whether you're talking about an event that's being added to your calendar," Sjogereen said.
Google Calendar users will be able to create new events directly out of their Gmail messages, or they can also use a feature called QuickAdd in order to add appointments using natural language, typing "lunch with pat noon Friday," to create a new calendar entry, for example.
Once events are created, Google Calendar can send out e-mail invitations to other participants and send event reminders and change notifications to the Google user.

Share With Others
But setting up a personal calendar is only part of the picture. Google Calendar will allow users to search for and then subscribe to publicly available calendars--the schedule of a local baseball team for example--and then integrate that information into their own calendars.
Google Calendar, which will support the iCal data exchange standard used by a number of groupware products, will also let users share their calendars with others using the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) syndication technology.

source:pcworld

Trend Micro™ HouseCall: Ease your mind and scan your PC for viruses and spyware.

Scan your hard drive for viruses and spyware with this free online tool. You simply choose the drives you want to scan and click on the "Scan" button. HouseCall can check more than 17,000 files in five minutes. Unlike Symantec's online tool, which only scans for viruses, HouseCall scans and fixes any infected files.
The following link will take you to Trend Micro's Web site, where the vendor encourages you to register before using the tool.

FREE on-demand service scans your PC for viruses, spyware, and more.Trend Micro™ HouseCall™ is a FREE Web-based solution designed to scan your PC for a wide range of Internet security threats including viruses, worms, Trojans, and spyware. It also detects system vulnerabilities and provides a link so you can easily download missing security patches. After each scan, HouseCall delivers a detailed report, which identifies security threats detected on your computer.

Scan Now. It's Free!


System Requirements:
Trend Micro’s HouseCall requires the following minimum system components:
Hardware:
133MHz Intel™ Pentium™ processor or equivalent
64MB of RAM
At least 30MB of available disk space

Operating System:
Microsoft Windows 98SE/NT4.0,SP6a/2000,SP2/XP,SP1/2003 and Windows MCE 2005
Linux Distributions that supports libc6
Solaris 2.6 and above

Software:
Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 6.0 or later
Mozilla Firefox 1.0.5, 1.0.6, 1.0.7, 1.5
Mozilla 1.7.12

Display:
Monitor that supports 800 x 600 resolution at 256 colors or higher Important Notes about HouseCall 6.5

HouseCall 6.5 has two independent Core Engines to choose from:
The ActiveX Core Engine: to use this engine, please adjust here the IE browser’s Security level to Medium at least and be sure that signed ActiveX objects are enabled.
The Java VM Core Engine- to use this engine, please install the Java VM from www.java.com.

ABC Puts TV Shows Online For Free

Latest news in the rapidly-developing world of Internet TV: ABC is putting Desperate Housewives, Lost, Commander in Chief, and Alias up as free Webcasts, the day after their broadcast premieres. You'll be able to jump from chapter to chapter, but--here's the gotcha--there will be commercials you can't skip.

I'm not yet sure what technology ABC is using, or or whether it'll deliver gorgeous full-screen video or a tiny, choppy window. We're presumably talking streaming-only viewing here, not downloads you can take with you. (ABC is, of course, selling downloadable shows via Apple's iTunes Music Store.) All of this is a two-month test that begins in May.

ABC also announced Soapnetic, a broadband TV channel for Verizon DSL customers featuring some pretty old-school content: soap operas. I'm not sure whether this will only be available on Verizon for marketing or technical reasons. But even though I've never watched an entire episode of a soap opera in my life--okay, maybe one or two back in the golden age of Luke and Laura--I'm happy to see niche broadband programming channels start to pop up.

Internet TV is still in its very, very early stages, and not every content owner is being as bold as Disney/ABC in trying out different technologies and business models. Still, it's pretty remarkable how much has happened in just the past few months.

Between the shows available on iTunes and AOL's In2TV and NBC's Webcasts of the evening news and Google Video's for-pay episodes of stuff like I Love Lucy and other developments, a lot of TV has made the transition to the Net all of a sudden. Content owners seem to be a lot more open-minded and experimental than they were when music started to go digital...and that can only be healthy.

Do you see yourself watching any of these ABC shows on the Web? And do non-skippable commercials sound like an affront, or a reasonable deal? (You can always do what people have done for sixty years to avoid TV ads: wander off to the kitchen or bathroom when a commercial comes on...)

source:pcworld

Windows on Mac

Duncan Martell in San Francisco
APPLE has rolled out its first software to give users the option to run Windows on its PCs.By allowing Macs to run Microsoft's Windows, the operating system found on more than 90 per cent of the world's personal computers, Apple could woo people who want Macs, but prefer the Windows operating system.

In June 2005, Apple said it would switch to Intel chips from those made by IBM, citing the performance advantages of Intel processors.

"Ever since we introduced Macs using Intel chips, we've had some customers asking, 'Hey, can you run Windows on these Macs as well?'" Phil Schiller, head of worldwide product marketing for Apple, said in an interview.

Apple, which celebrated its 30th birthday on April 1, will move its entire Mac line to Intel chips by the end of 2007.

Mr Schiller said company research showed two groups of potential Mac customers, what it called "switchers," or those likely to switch from Windows to the Mac OS X operating system.

The first group included those who are open to using a Mac but want to run programs that work only on Windows, such as Microsoft's Outlook calendar program, which isn't supported on Mac OS X, or popular video games.

The second group included those open to using the Mac OS X PC, but wanting a "safety net" if they chose to run Windows.

"Most of them will switch and find they never need to run Windows," Mr Schiller said.
Apple, with about 3 per cent of the worldwide PC market, said the "Boot Camp" software, available immediately as a download, enabled Macs to run either Windows XP or the Mac OS X operating software.

With the patch Mac users will be able to run games and other programs on their Mac OS X without buying a separate Windows-based computer.

"We view this as positive for Apple as it opens a new market to the company and greatly expands the (potential market) for Intel-based Macs," said Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore in a note to clients. "This will be a particular benefit for business applications where users need to run Windows for certain applications."

Apple plans to preview the next major version of its Mac OS X operating system software in August - which will include a Windows option.

Mr Whitmore said with the test release Apple could grab market share during the critical Christmas holiday period since the consumer debut of Microsoft's new Vista software system is delayed until 2007.

JP Morgan analyst Chris Shope estimated that each additional percentage point of PC market share would give Apple another $US2 billion ($2.75 billion) in revenue and more than 30 cents per share in earning.

The final version of Boot Camp will be available as a feature in Mac OS X version 10.5, code-named "Leopard."

Mr Schiller said Apple "absolutely has no plans to sell or support Windows. We're just helping our customers with Boot Camp to install Windows if they want to".

If sufficient numbers of customers convinced Apple to give away software for the easy installation of Windows on Intel-powered Macs, it stood to reason, analysts said, that it would support the use of Vista on future Macs, too.

source:http://australianit.news.com.au