Jerry Blogger: Computer and Internet : news tips tricks tweaks

Thursday, August 05, 2010

News Alert: No serious injuries in Canadian military helicopter incident

News Alert

No serious injuries in Canadian military helicopter incident
Five people suffered minor injuries when a Canadian Chinook helicopter made what military officials describe as a hard landing and caught on fire in Afghanistan's Kandahar province on Thursday.

Jerry Blogger / CC BY-ND 3.0

Google drops Google Wave

Service will continue through year's end; technology to be rolled into other Google products;
A little more than a year after the service was launched, Google is pulling the plug on its Google Wave social-networking service, the company said Wednesday."Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," wrote Urs Hölzle, Google senior vice president for operations, in a blog post. As a result of the public indifference, "We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a stand-alone product," he said.
The company will maintain the service through the end of the year, and the technology will be rolled into other Google projects, Hölzle said. Some features are already available as open-source components, and Google will offer tools to let users "easily 'liberate' their content from Wave," he said.
Hölzle implied that Wave might have been too radical of a concept for mass adoption, despite the company's many attempts to explain it to the public.
A "Web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a Web browser," he said. "We weren't quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication."
The decision seems to have been made rather speedily. As recently as Monday, the company posted information about upcoming Wave developer talks in Washington D.C. and Michigan.
At the O'Reilly Open Source Conference last month in Portland, Oregon, Google Wave developer Dan Peterson admitted, in a Wave tutorial, that early versions of the service were slow and tended to crash. Subsequent work improved performance and made the product more stable, he noted.

Jerry Blogger / CC BY-ND 3.0

Freed Abdullah Khadr welcomes 'new beginning' Abdullah Khadr has been released from a Toronto detention centre after a judge stayed an extradition hearing against the accused al-Qaeda sympathizer Wednesday, telling reporters: "I think this is going to be a new beginning for me in life." The 28-year-old is the brother of Omar Khadr, who is being held by American authorities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

News Alert

Freed Abdullah Khadr welcomes 'new beginning'
Abdullah Khadr has been released from a Toronto detention centre after a judge stayed an extradition hearing against the accused al-Qaeda sympathizer Wednesday, telling reporters: "I think this is going to be a new beginning for me in life." The 28-year-old is the brother of Omar Khadr, who is being held by American authorities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Jerry Blogger / CC BY-ND 3.0

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

News Alert: Windsor surgeon should have full privileges: report

News Alert

Windsor surgeon should have full privileges: report
A report recommends that Dr. Barbara Heartwell, a surgeon who performed mistaken mastectomies in Windsor, Ont., should have full privileges restored.

Jerry Blogger / CC BY-ND 3.0

OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 RC 2 released

no English version yet, so download the stable one for now! You can actually give up Microsoft Office with this nice free tool~!

Download Full Installation Sets

Jerry Blogger / CC BY-ND 3.0

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Defraggler - File and Disk Defragmentation - Free Download

Defraggler

Disk Defragmentation

Use Defraggler to defrag your entire hard drive, or individual files - unique in the industry. This compact and portable Windows application supports NTFS and FAT32 file systems.

Most defrag tools only allow you to defrag an entire drive. Defraggler lets you specify one or more files, folders, or the whole drive to defragment.
When Defraggler reads or writes a file, it uses the exact same techniques that Windows uses. Using Defraggler is just as safe for your files as using Windows.
At a glance, you can see how fragmented your hard drive is. Defraggler's drive map shows you blocks that are empty, not fragmented, or needing defragmentation.

Give your hard drive a quick touch-up with Quick Defrag
Organizes empty disk space to further prevent fragmentation
Defragment while you sleep - and wake up with a faster PC. Set Defraggler to run daily, weekly or monthly
Full Windows OS and Multi-lingual support
Supports 37 major languages

Defraggler is made by Piriform, the company that also brought you CCleaner and Recuva, so is completely free!

Jerry Blogger / CC BY-ND 3.0

Meaning of name: Smith

Origin: English

Derived from the Anglo-Saxon "smitan," to smite or strike, SMITH and its derivations are an occupational name for a man who works with metal (smith or blacksmith), one of the earliest jobs for which specialist skills were required. It is a craft that was practiced in all countries, making the surname and its derivations the most common of all surnames. Smith still tops the list of most popular surnames in England and America, and is also a very common last name in Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Canada and Australia.

Jerry Blogger / CC BY-ND 3.0