YouTube community is richer with the first known royal contributor. Queen Rania of Jordan created her first channel. Her intention is to post movies about life and culture in Arab companies. She hopes to bring a much wider view about life there, and also to demolish stereotypes.
One single video was posted so far, but it attracted over 150K views in the first days.
“I want people to know the real Arab world; to see it unedited, unscripted and unfiltered. To see the personal side of my region. To know the places and faces and rituals and culture that shape the part of the world I call home.”
Intel announced that it will launch solid-state hard disks (SSDs), which to replace the mechanical hard disk drives. This news should worry the other hard disks manufacturers, as Intel did not have a share of the HD market.
Capacities of the Intel SSDs would range between 32 and 160 GB, much more than Samsung’s 32 to 64 GB hard disks. The disks will be in SATA form, and the most important advantages would be the low power consumption and the awesome shock resistance (3-4 times better than typical mechanical disks).
Boris Epstein, founder of Sillicon Valley based BINC (a company specialized in head-hunting technical workers) says Yahoo! is in big trouble, because a lot of people leave the company.
Many employees of Yahoo! do not want to work for the merge between Yahoo! and Microsoft, considering that, while Yahoo! is good, Microsoft is evil. Other reasons are the lack of support for open-source from Microsoft and the “not so interesting” technologies of MS.
Other people say bureaucracy has made innovations impossible at Yahoo. The fact that in January Yahoo! announced that it will fire 1000 employees makes people not be sure about their job at Yahoo, so that prefer to search for another job.
VeriSign announced that the cost of registering Internet domain names with the .com and .net TLD will be raised.
Currently, registrering a .com domain costs $6.42, and a .net costs $3.85. The new prices, which will be probably introduced on October 1st, will be $6.86 and $4.23. It is expected that this change will be reflected by the prices asked by the domain registrars starting from now, till the end of the year.
Other announcements of this kind are probable this year.
A nice video about the partnership between Indiana University and Vicious Cycle Software. The students will have access to the same professional software package that developers used to create the most popular games on the market. Who wouldn’t want to be a student at Indiana University?
Reuters announces that a leading brokerage claims that the Microsoft giant will raise the offer for Yahoo (current offer is $31 per share).
Analyst Mark Mahaney believes that Microsoft is trying to find alternatives, if the deal for Yahoo is not reached. One of the possibilities would be to offer a share of Microsoft to Time Warner, in exchange for the Time Warner online content, considered of high-value.
Citigroup continues to say that the most probable thing to happen is the Microsoft-Yahoo deal.
According to pcpro.co.uk, Mozilla just announced that Firefox 3 will be officially released in June. As you may know, there already is a Beta 4 version available for download here, on Mozilla website. (link is for english version).
Mike Schroepfer said that people can migrate from Firefox 2 without any problems, because the existing Beta version is stable enough. Even more, he said “In many ways it (Firefox 3) is much more stable than anything else out there”.
This update is just in time for Mozilla, because the competition is also evolving. Apple just released Safari version 4.1, and Microsoft is working on Internet Explorer 8.
Google announced the release of a new tool for webmasters: Google AJAX Language API. With only Javascript, it can detect and translate blocks of text within web pages. It uses the Web 2.0 technology, and the supported languages are: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. The API supports 29 translation pairs.
For an easy integration, Google offers some examples of using the Language Translation API. Though automated translations are not as good as human translations, it became very often that websites offer their visitors the possibility of reading the content in the other languages. Google said that the new API will be improved in the future, so stay tuned
If you like mysteries and ghost stories, this game is perfect for you.
Since Azada, I was waiting for a good seek and find game. For my surprise, this game exceeded my expectations. It has a unique way of making you find objects. If in other games of this type you have to find a certain object, here you have to find pieces of that object. Each object is broken in 4 pieces. Furthermore, some objects require items that are not on a single board. You might have to move between 2 -3 boards to complete one puzzle.
Playing this game you never get bored. It is so different than other seek and find games, that it captured my attention until the end.
One more thing, there is no time limit for a puzzle. This way, you never run out of time.
I can think of only one draqback of Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor: too short.
PC Tools announced an update on the source of malware. Russia goes to first place, with 27.9%, making China to fall on the second place, with 26.5%, and US to fall on the 3rd place, with 10%. Brazil follows, with 6.7%, Ukraine with 5.4%, and UK with 5.3%.
The new “king of malware”, Russia, is also #1 for sending unsolicited emails (spam).
