Yahoo Opens IM to Developers. Sweet!

Yahoo Messenger, with 60 million worldwide users, just got a lot more interesting, releasing a software development kit to allow third parties to create content plugins.

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Yahoo's Latest Addition

Yahoo has released a software that converts PC into a DVR (Digital Video Recorder).

The software Go For TV can be downloaded at free of cost and after the installation users can plug their computer into their television's video and audio input connections. The computer can then record and play back shows on the TV just like with a standalone DVR. Consumers can also play DVDs, music, photos or other downloaded content.

The Yahoo software, as of yet, only runs on Windows and requires a computer with 20GB of disk space to store recorded programs, 512MB of RAM and a 1GHz processor.

The DVR feature on Go for TV also requires a TV tuner card and connector cables for connecting to a TV monitor.While the software works with any TV signal, Yahoo recommends a 1.5mbps broadband connection for best results.

Windows crashes automatically if you don't switch off the machine for 49.7 Days

Windows crashes automatically if you don't switch off the machine for 49.7 Days. Microsoft accepts this. Do you know why?

In Windows the Virtual Machine Manager (here after referred as VMM) is responsible for creation, execution, monitoring and termination of virtual machines. This VMM, which is a 32 bit, protected mode operating system entity, provides a number of system services at chip level. One of these services is "Get_System_Time". This particular service loads the EAX register with the time in milliseconds since Windows started on that machine. This service is accurate to 1 ms. EAX is a 32 bit register in Intel 386 Processor onwards.

So the maximum number of milliseconds it can hold is

(232)-1 = 4294967295 milliseconds = 4294967.295 seconds = 71582.79 minutes = 1193 hours = 49.7 days.

So after 49.7 days the EAX resets to zero. Most of the Drivers use this Time Service to keep track of the Timeout of various services they provide.

So after 49.7 days the drivers cannot use the Get_System_Time function of VMM and they crash taking the OS along with.

Please check this knowledge base article 216641:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216641/EN-US/

Samsung Releases Hybrid Drives

Samsung has released the new generation Hybrid hard drives which aims to significantly reduce the boot time of the PC as well as improve performance. But at this time the price per gigabyte of a solid-state hard drive is currently about 30 times higher than that of a traditional hard drive, and capacity is limited to about 30GB.

In these devices, the entire hard drive is nonvolatile cache without any moving parts. (It's almost like using a USB thumbdrive as the main hard drive for the notebook.)

A Rival For JPEG

Microsoft has come with a new image format that could be a threat for JPEG. The format named Windows Media Photo that would be made available in Windows XP and in forthcoming Windows Vista

Microsoft claims to display an image with 24:1 compresssion.Looks like it is going to pose a major threat for JPEG. Wait and watch what is going to happen.....

Obtain Invitation For Windows Live Mail

Hotmail, Microsoft's famous web mail service is soon to be renamed as Windows Live Mail. Its still in the beta process and have opened an invitation to use for the existing Hotmail users.

All you need is to visit here and click the option "Windows Live Mail Beta".

You will be directed to the corresponding page where you need to enter your Hotmail or MSN address and within a week you will receive a invitation to join Windows Live Mail Beta..

And above all you will get a whooping 2GB of space once you have signed in..

So go and grab this wonderful offer...

Get Yahoo! Mail Beta Without Invitation

1. Log into Yahoo! Mail and click on "My Account" and enter your password if prompted.

2. On the Account Info page next to the "Member Information" header click on "Edit."

Under "General Preferences" click on the link next to "Language & Content" or "Preferred Content" (mine says "Yahoo! U.S.").

3. On the subsequent page in the "New Setting" box choose Yahoo! United Kingdom, Germany, or France.

4. Click "Finished" and then "Finished" again on the next page.

You'll be prompted to sign a new TOS and then you should get an offer to join the Yahoo! Mail Beta.