IT Happens : July 2004
Monthly News Notice of IT Happenings
Issue - 37

Web Special

Feature of the Month

Gmail leads the email marathon
Gmail makes email easy. With 1000 megabytes (1 GB) of free storage, you never need to throw messages away. And with a powerful built-in Google search engine, you no longer need to set up folders, file your mail, or remember where you stored your messages. Just search for what you want. You'll not only find the message you have in mind, but all the other messages that are part of the same conversation arranged in chronological order so you can easily put everything in context.

The Report Spam button in gmail removes spam from the inbox and sends valuable data to the Gmail team working on spam blocking. There are no pop-ups or untargeted banner ads. Gmail users only see relevant text ads, similar to those on Google search results pages. The matching of ads to content is a completely automated process performed by computers. No humans read your email to target the ads, and no email content or other personally identifiable information is ever provided to advertisers. Ads are matched using the same technology that powers the Google AdSense program, which already places targeted ads on thousands of sites across the web by quickly analyzing the content of pages and determining which ads are most relevant to them. 

The Gmail interface is currently available in English. However, google is committed to making Gmail available to as many people in as many languages as possible. And Gmail accounts can already be used to read and send email in most languages.

Quote - IT

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the WorldWideWeb…now even my cat has its own home page. 

WM Clinton

Personality Of The Month

Ray Tomlinson has all the characteristics of an 'inventor'. A precocious child, he performed extremely well at school and went on to get a major in electrical engineering (with an internship at IBM). But he dropped out of MIT just so he could devote more time to his research work. His first job was with BBN, a company engaged in research on ARPANET. In the year 1971, Tomlinson was working on two projects SNDMSG and
CYPNET- simultaneously.

A brainwave led him to combine the qualities of the two and thus invent the electronic mail or e-mail, as we better know it today. Tomlinson is presently working on a software application that can perform logistics planning. In contrast to the present trend of job hopping, Tomlinson has continued working at one place for the last 30 years. 

IT Snippets 

HOTBAR: Browsing Experience of the Future

Electronic paper , which promises to change the face of publishing and save forests, came closer to reality last month as scientists revealed a super-thin , flexible electronic-ink display screen. Just 0.012 inches thick, the device developed by researchers at E Ink Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts , USA, can be flexed without distorting the type and paves the way for electronic newspapers, wearable computer screens and smart identity cards. When it is fully developed e-paper will be able to display black and white and colour text using wireless technology. Buying the daily newspaper will no longer be necessary because with e-paper it will be updated wirelessly or through the Internet. 

The display consists of two components . The front part switches according to electronic signals and the back component is a circuit made of transistors that control each individual pixel that composes the display. The current device is too thick to be folded in half but the company is working on a thinner version. 


(Source : www. Hotbar.com)

Online music providers offering sharing, legally 

Free-for-all music sharing online has drawn the ire of the recording industry, but some commercial online music providers and even a few recording artists are opting to allow music fans to share the songs they've bought. The latest to do so is San Diego-based MusicMatch. The company launched a revamped version of its digital music service with a new feature that enables subscribers to send e-mails embedded with Internet links for songs they want to share. Like Napster 2.0 and other licensed digital music purveyors who have rolled out similar options, the MusicMatch sharing feature comes with features nowhere to be found in the peer-to-peerfile-sharing bazaars accessed through software like Kazaa and eDonkey. 

MusicMatch's overhaul brings it in line with other services that offer streaming permanent song and album downloads and subscription access to streaming music. MusicMatch subscribers can share playlists with fellow subscribers and others who don't subscribe to the service. Unlike Napster, which only allows nonsubscribers to listen to 30-second song snippets, MusicMatch allows songs to be played three times before the songs lock. Then only 30-second cuts can be heard. Anyone who opens the file gets to hear the songs three times and then the files lock up until the computer user pays to unlock it. 

(Source : www.usatoday.com)

Web Watch 
www.Questia.com 
This website holds the distinction of being the world’s largest online library of books. Its collection of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences, plus magazine and newspaper articles can be accessed round the clock. To complement the library, Questia offers a range of search, note-taking, and writing tools. These tools help students locate the most relevant information on their topics quickly, quote and cite correctly, and create properly formatted footnotes and bibliographies automatically. Questia provides a comprehensive research environment to meet students' academic needs.

IT Humour 

Email Mistakes

It's wise to remember how easily email -- this wonderful technology -- can be misused, sometimes unintentionally, with serious consequences.

Consider the case of the Illinois man who left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick email. 

Unfortunately, when typing her address, he missed one letter, and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher's wife whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her email, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint. 

At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen: 

"Dearest wife just got checked in. Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow. P.S. Sure is hot down here."


IT Quiz 

  1. What is .Net technology? 
  2. What is P2P networking?

IT Quiz Solutions

  1. Microsoft® .NET is the Microsoft Web services solution, which will significantly change how people interact with applications and devices via the Web. This technology provides an integrated solution to create and connect standards based applications, services and devices. For e.g. you may be using word, excel PowerPoint, outlook in a common interface and transfer this information to someone else's computer directly from your interface. The world of .net based smart devices is also opening up, where it would be possible to control your home appliances from anywhere. 
  2. Expanded as Peer to Peer networking; this technology permits easy sharing of local resources on user's computers using the internet as a medium. The power of this technology is being used to share music files amongst various users so that they can play them from their friends computers. Napster, Kaaza are the famous P2P tools.