Monday, November 1, 2010

New & faster Yahoo! Mail, now after Facebook embeds Twitter.

Yahoo is working hard to make its Web e-mail service unparallel and for that it acknowledges the need to promote more and more social fix. It was this Wednesday, when Yahoo announced its intention to release the new version of its Yahoo Mail Beta client. It was promised that this new version would be twice as fast as the previous version, and include the new features like an integrated Twitter client, rich media previews and a more full-featured instant messaging client.

Yahoo says this speed boost should be especially noticeable to users outside the U.S. with latency issues, due mostly to the new version making use of the company's cloud computing technology. This means that if you're on a spotty connection, the app can adjust its behavior to keep pages from timing out, or becoming unresponsive.

Yahoo briefed that as speed and performance increase were among the top user’s requests, along with that they had also added a very robust Twitter client, which extends the already frequently used social-sharing tools for Facebook and Yahoo. You will not only be able to only post to Twitter, but also any combination of the other two services as well. Not only just a stream would be running instead, now you will be able to do things like reply and retweet without leaving the page!

Moreover, among these changes, the most valued change includes Yahoo changing the  welcome feature in the form of media previews. Plus, now when you will get a link to a YouTube video, a Flickr or Picasa photo set, you will be able to view that content without leaving the message. This integration means that now Clicking on any of these items, as well as attached photos, will open them up in a simple lightbox viewer on the same screen.

To get all these new features, all the users have to do is to to opt in to Yahoo's Beta for Mail. They are not yet integrated into the company's Classic mail service.

Evidently, Even Police Officers Come To Use Facebook For Tracking Crimimals!

Today, when all the senior officers are being been forced to keep pace with the rapidly evolving change in techno-world to gather intelligence on suspects from street gangs to fraudsters. Now, even the courses of thousands of student investigators have been trimmed to train them to bring their work into the 21st century. This includes professional skills on how to gather new information and more importantly how to track down suspects through social networking sites. Where it has been observed, being casual, wanted people may reveal valuable clues. These updated training exercises manly emphasis how to gather the best information from computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices.

Craig Lynch, an escaped prisoner mocked police with clues about his whereabouts on Facebook during four months on the run. He was cought earlier this year.

Nick Gargan. The Deputy Chief Constable of the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) quoted that this updated training course and their exercises are 'Vital' in these words: ''This programme is a vital part of the career pathway for detectives and the new training covers sensitive areas of policing where limited guidance existed previously. These improvements are exactly what detectives need to tackle the challenges and complexities of modern policing effectively.”

Later on he added: “The changes underline the importance to having a national agency to provide guidance and train detectives to a single high standard so they can work on investigations in any part of the country and give their colleagues and the public the best quality service in fighting crime.''

Each year approximately around 3,500 student detectives take the initial crime investigator's development programme. This revised training course also includes new guidance and techniques on how best to investigate honor-based violence, record evidence of domestic abuse and tackle rape as well.

Motorolla Facing Dual Lawsuits From Apple

This Friday Apple Inc. filed two lawsuits against Motorola and Motorola Mobility in a US federal court, declaring that Motorolla has violated its patents in several Motorola cell phones, including almost the entire Droid line.

In the October 29 filings Apple states to the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin -- first reported by the blog PatentlyApple -- Apple is accusing Motorola of infringing on six patents, three of them focused on touchscreens. All the Motorola's Droid, Droid 2, Droid X, Cliq, Cliq XT, BackFlip, Devour A555, Devour i1, and Charm are included in the products that it claims have infringing technology!

Motorola Mobility had already filed suit against Apple, earlier this month, demanding the US District Court in Delaware to give a declaratory judgment stating that Apple had no rights what so ever to sue it for infringing 12 patents in the first place. Further, it said Apple has emphasized in targeting Android-phone maker HTC. Apple itself is seeking a jury trial and considering compensatory damages as Motorola has also filed two patent infringement lawsuits against Apple charging violations in the iPad, iTouch and iPhone products.

DNA Bar-Coding Aims To Protect Endangered Species

DNA barcodes are now believed to help track endangered species and those smuggled to other countries as food or consumer products. They now plan to use make specific International Barcode of Life Project (iBOL) by fragments of DNA extracted from a standardized region of tissue. It is now said to be the world's first reference library of DNA barcodes and the largest biodiversity genomics project. 

The assistant professor of molecular ecology at the University of Guelph's Biodiversity Institute of Ontario Alex Smith explained his vision in these words: "What we're trying to do is to create this global library of DNA barcodes -- snippets, little chunks of DNA -- that permit us to identify species."

Scientists believe that all species, from extinct to thriving, will eventually get their own DNA barcode, later which can be hopefully one day read by handheld mobile devices. A library will be made initially containing than 87,000 formally described species with filed barcodes and more than 1 million total barcoded specimens. Moreover, the barcode will be viewable within a week registering free at the website called boldsystems.org, which is  the website for Barcode of Life Datasystems (BOLD).

"Most of life on the planet is not polar bears and Siberian tigers -- most of life on the planet weighs less than a gram, is less than a centimeter long, and isn't visual,” Smith said adding “It experiences the world through taste and smell and we're not aware of its existence."

It is believed that it will take hard work of 20 years till eventually the Canada-based iBOL barcode’s all 10 million species of multicellular life. 

150 Lucky Followers of @NASA on Twitter Visit The Space Center

A group of 150 lucky people who follow NASA out of more than 600,000 who people on Twitter are headed to the Kennedy Space Center for two days of activities.
Out of that huge number of followers 2,700 people signed up online immediately to this "Tweetup" program as it's known. Wednesday is the scheduled time for the shuttle launch so, in advance, on Monday all the randomly selected 150 participants will get a tour for free. This also includes the front row seats for the Discovery’s liftoff as well.
Krissy Guttendorf, a resident of West Melbourne claims she has watched plenty of shuttle launches over the years, but all from a distance. This time she'll be about three miles from the launchpad, which she says is "unbelievable."
NASA states that it aims to hold other such Tweetups in the future as well.
Free counters!