If you’re one of the few humans on the planet lucky enough not to have a copy of Microsoft Word on their PC, you can occasionally find yourself in a bit of a bind when someone sends you a document which was created with Microsoft Word.
Luckily, this is one of the rare times when Microsoft comes to your rescue — without asking for your credit card details.
Microsoft distributes a free Microsoft Word viewer, along with viewers for many of their other popular applications.
After experimenting for a few months with various ways to introduce ads in their videos, YouTube is finally launching a video ad platform. The current format is represented by a strip which occupies 20% of the video. The ad appears only after 15 seconds of the movie have passed and if the user clicks the ad, the video is paused and a new window opens for the ad. If the user does not click the ad, it’s displayed for 10 seconds and then it disappears.
As for the pricing, Google choose to apply a 20$ fee for 1000 impressions. Although it’s a little weird they use this instead of the Google classic Pey Per Click system, but Google officials think that safer CPM model will be better for their customers.
So having YouTube as a constant user-generated content pool, Google can provide extensive coverage for publishers and interesting ways to financially attract advertisers. But for now the platform has to be tested to eliminate eventual bugs and to attract publishers.
When Google launched their new Google Gears service a couple of months ago, I was sure online-based applications will make full use of it. And that’s just the case with Zoho, one of the most popular online office suite and a direct contestant of Google Docs.
The fact that they used Google Gears to provide offline availability for Zoho Writer before Google did is funny in a way. But for now only Zoho Writer will be accessible offline, the rest of the Zoho suite is going to be made available in weeks to come, and besides that the documents will be read-only when offline.
After the install of the Google Gears plugin a “Go Offline” button will be enabled, not that this only works with Internet Explorer 6 or higher or Mozilla 1.5 or higher. Zoho lovers should be pleased, as this is only the beginning and other features will become available in the following 4 or 5 weeks.
It seems that the problems Skype users were experiencing were over as of yesterday. For the moment Skype officials only posted a brief notice, promising to give more details on Monday.
Hello friends,
Take a deep breath. Skype is back to normal.
On Monday, we’ll provide a more detailed explanation of what happened. Until then, we’d like to apologize and thank you. Precisely in that order.
We know how difficult and frustrating the past two days have been. And still, your good wishes kept flowing in. Thank you for the amazing patience, trust and support!
Yesterday the service came back online, first the VoIP calls an then, the presence and chat services became available. Skype blames the outage on “a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software”. The latest news is that this fault was present in every copy of Skype downloaded since 2003 until now. Although nobody seems to know why the failure of the system occurred now, since it was present since 2003, some say that it has something to do with the Skype network infrastructure that relies on high-bandwith peers. When several of these peers go down the whole network becomes unstable.
For short there’s no exact answers and we’ll have to wait until Monday to find out more.
As you all know, various complaints started flowing in since Thursday, that Skype users were not able to login to their VoIP sessions. Skype promptly posted an official statement on their company blog:
Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.
The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen. This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network.
So it seems it’s a software issue and not a hacking/exploit bug. Rumors say that the service will not be functional throughout the week-end, despite of the official announcements. I just hope that Skype will be back to normal soon as they currently sum up 220 million users.
The weird thing is that the code renders correctly in Firefox, Opera, Safari and even IE7, but when accessed with IE6, it pops in a fatal error mshtml.dll. Special thanks to Hamachiya2 (a Japanese blogger) who actually discovered this.
Nintendo Wii’s Shopping Channel was unavailable for three hours or so earlier. It was a sign. It seems that Nintendo updated the Wii firmware in order to include a few small but very nice features. Some sources report that an increase of the User Interface’s speed is in place.
See this report on the full features implemented with this Firmware upgrade, and you can see some interesting screenshots from the referred source.
I myself own a Nintendo Wii and I will update it to the new features as soon as I have some free time
Just a few days ago, KDE 4.0 Beta was released, a release that marks the beginning of the integration process for KDE. This release is bound to bring new technologies with its libraries straight to the applications.
This comes about two months after the first Alpha was made public. Now KDE enters a stage of a full freeze regarding the library interface. From now on, the applications will focus on integrating the new technology refined during the last months, and the library developers will try to fix all bugs found during this process.
There will be no new applications for the official KDE modules. In the following weeks, KDE developers will be able to add features to their applications until the next beta is released and the application features will be frozen as well.
Where are they standing at this very point? Have a look here and find out.
The Google Mashup Editor is a new project launched by Google, intended for creating quick mashups and simple applications. Unfortunately, it’s currently in the beta stage of development and the access seems limited to a small number of developers during this test period. If you want, you may get notified when further registrations will be allowed. All you have to do is register here.
Here are the main features, for those interested:
Google services mashed up
Take some AJAX UI components, data from your users and Google services like Google Base and Google Maps or external feeds and mash them all together using our simple framework.
Common web technologies doing uncommon things
The Google Mashup Editor allows you to use HTML, Javascript, CSS and XML to create an infinite variety of applications with technology you are familiar with.
Simple tools for sophisticated apps
Using the Google Mashup Editor you can create, debug and deploy your application in one interface.
