Blockbuster Takes On Netflix, Apple With Direct-To-TV Player -- On-Demand Video -- InformationWeek

Blockbuster Takes On Netflix, Apple With Direct-To-TV Player -- On-Demand Video -- InformationWeek: "Blockbuster Takes On Netflix, Apple With Direct-To-TV Player"

Hewlett-Packard Cuts 25,000 Jobs After E.D.S. Purchase - NYTimes.com

Hewlett-Packard Cuts 25,000 Jobs After E.D.S. Purchase - NYTimes.com: "The computer and printer maker Hewlett-Packard announced Monday that it would eliminate nearly 25,000 of its 320,000 jobs as part of its plan for digesting Electronic Data Systems, the computer services giant that H.P. acquired for $13.9 billion in August."

Official gmail blog

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/new-gmail-code-base-now-for-ie6-too.html

New Gmail code base now for IE6 too

Friday, September 05, 2008 1:46 PM

Posted by Jon Perlow, Gmail engineer

Last October, we launched a rewritten code base for the Gmail user interface to Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 users. Since then, we've added support for Safari 3 and Firefox 3 and improved performance in other browsers. This new code base included major performance improvements and provided us with a solid foundation for launching new features such as colored labels, group chat and rich emoticons, invisible mode, AIM integration,Gmail Labs, an updated contact manager, and remote sign out.

The newest version of Gmail pushes modern browser technology to the limit, so initially we weren't able to make it available to those of you who use IE6. Because it was released way back in 2001, IE6 wasn't able to handle the complexity of the new code in a way that met our performance and stability goals. Over the last few months, we've been working with the IE engineers at Microsoft to address these issues: they released a critical update to their JavaScript implementation that fixed a performance problem with how the script engine allocates and frees memory. We also made small simplifications to the UI when it runs in IE6 to improve stability. For example, we removed the drop shadow from contact pop-ups and the rounded corners from chat moles, both of which tended to cause problems in IE6.

This week, we've started to roll out Gmail's new code base to IE6 users. If you use IE6 and have the latest IE6 updates from Microsoft installed (or the specific patch that's required), you'll start seeing the features listed above.

Yahoo buys Dial Pad - GigaOM

Yahoo buys Dial Pad - GigaOM


Yahoo buys Dial Pad
Om Malik, Tuesday, June 14, 2005 at 11:04 AM PT Comments (45)
A week ago, I asked the question: how serious is Yahoo about voice? It seems they are quite serious! Much of it might have to do with Brad Garlinghouse who according to Andy was one of the big guns at DialPad, and is bringing the VoIP religion to Yahoo.
Yahoo, like other IM providers might have been late to the VoIP party, but the company is quickly making up for lost time. Barely a month after launching its own VoIP enabled IM beta product, the company snapped up DialPad, a VoIP company that sells PC2PC and PC2Phone services to consumers. “What we saw in DialPad was quick way to add PC2Phone and inbound calls,” says Joanna Stevens, Yahoo’s VP of Corporate Communications. Yahoo will integrate Dialpad’s services with its new IM product.
Andy explains quite well, when he writes: Dialpad provides Yahoo immediately with a proven platform that delivers least cost routing, the Dialpad engine that routes international traffic and enables termination plus gives them the billing, OSS and capability to make a Pre-Paid offering that terminates and possibly originates PSTN calling. Clearly this means Yahoo is going after the international audience and is looking to go right after Skype.Update#2: Yahoo confirmed the deal, declined to talk numbers and assured me that Yahoo’s broadband partners (read Bells) are well aware of its voice plans.Update#1: Craig Walker just called and confirmed the deal.
Scoop: Did Yahoo just buy VoIP operator, DialPad? I guess the next last thing to Skype? The PR folks at Dialpad were in a meeting and were thrown in a tizzy when I rudely interrupted their deliberations. We cannot comment on this, please call our CEO, is what I was told. Everyone seems to be in a meeting, and I called Craig Walker, the CEO and was told he was in a meeting. I am told, Yahoo is busy gathering Dialpad employees with new employment offers.

Microsoft Dangles Carrot To Lure Smaller Businesses To Vista | bMighty.com: Blogs For Small Business and Mid-Sized Business

Microsoft Dangles Carrot To Lure Smaller Businesses To Vista bMighty.com: Blogs For Small Business and Mid-Sized Business: "Though support for Windows XP will continue until 2014, Microsoft stopped shipping the OS last month. Redmond is wielding that stick in hopes of prodding users toward Vista, but there's also a carrot: free user support -- though it's a limited time offer"

DreamWorks executive on why it switched from AMD to Intel | Crave, the gadget blog - CNET

DreamWorks executive on why it switched from AMD to Intel Crave, the gadget blog - CNET: "Intel had the best technology, Batter said. 'You need a lot more horsepower. On Intel's upcoming generation, the number of cores is going to help us satiate the big spike in our needs.'
DreamWorks had been in a three-year partnership with AMD, Batter said.
He explained that Intel is also helping DreamWorks to redesign its animation tools. 'Our animation tools are all proprietary here. Intel is rearchitecting our software tools...to take advantage of multicore and make our renderer highly scalable as well as making our character animation tools highly scalable.'
DreamWorks uses rendering farms with as many as 5,000 cores to create animation and its tools need to be adapted to the increasing number of processor cores, Batter said. The Nehalem chip, for example, is expected to integrate as many as eight cores. Currently, Intel offers no more than four cores per chip. Larrabee is expected by many to offer as many as 32 cores."

Major Web hosting provider launches low-cost groupware in US - Network World

Major Web hosting provider launches low-cost groupware in US - Network World: "Giant Web hosting provider 1&1 Internet is now offering U.S. customers a push e-mail and collaboration service based on the open-source groupware made by Open-Xchange.
1&1 first signed a deal last year with Open-Xchange, which has offices in Germany and New York, and initially rolled out the service in Europe. 1&1 claims to have more than 7 million customers."

Google Introduces a Cartoonlike Method for Talking in Chat Rooms

Google unveiled the new product in a post on its official blog — its characteristically understated way of introducing new features to the world. It can be reached at www.lively.com but is officially part of Google Labs, an area of the company’s site where it showcases projects that remain in the beta, or experimental, phase.
Lively and similar products from other companies have the potential to change the way people interact over the Web. Online chat rooms are two-dimensional — they include text, and sometimes voice and video.
Lively tries to make that conversation three-dimensional, more interactive and more fun. As if they were playing a game, users choose from a selection of unrealistically handsome or Disneyesque avatars. They can also create their own rooms, which can be posted to a blog or social network profile as easily as a YouTube video.
Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one another. (Text appears as cartoon-style bubbles atop the avatars.) Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa, Google’s photo service, as if they were pieces of art.
Inside Google, the product was headed by Niniane Wang, an engineering manager. Students at Arizona State University have been testing Lively for several months.
Ms. Wang wrote in the blog post that she developed Lively as a “20 percent project,” referring to Google’s philosophy that employees should spend one day a week working on projects outside of their day-to-day responsibilities.
Her spare time could cause some problems for companies with similar ideas. Second Life, the virtual world run by Linden Labs of San Francisco, is known for its much larger virtual world that hundreds of thousands of users can enter at the same time. But it is accessible through a separate program, not a Web browser. (Lively, which works only on Windows computers for now, requires the downloading of a bit of add-on software.)
Mark Kingdon, chief executive of Linden Labs, said Second Life’s value was not just in 3-D chat but also in more elaborate environments where people can work, play, teach, and buy and sell virtual products. “Users are highly motivated to create and transact in Second Life to the tune of almost a million dollars a day in user-to-user transactions,” Mr. Kingdon said.
Vivaty, a virtual-world start-up in Menlo Park, Calif., that is backed by the blue-chip venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, opened its virtual doors on Tuesday. Vivaty’s product is a similar 3-D chat room that runs on Facebook and through AOL Instant Messenger. In one version now available on Facebook, users can create a virtual dorm room and decorate it with furniture from Target.
Keith McCurdy, Vivaty’s chief executive and a former executive at the game giant Electronic Arts, said Google’s entry was a validation of the concept, and said Vivaty could get more traction by putting its virtual worlds on every Web site — even those controlled by Google’s rivals.
“We are not beholden to any one camp or approach,” Mr. McCurdy said. “We are trying to create an open system where lots of people have branded virtual scenes.”
Google’s success is not assured, of course. Other test products it has introduced have languished, like Product Search, originally known as Froogle.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/technology/09google.html?bl&ex=1215748800&en=bfa61dce8f16e341&ei=5087%0A

Executable and Linkable Format - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Executable and Linkable Format - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In computing, the Executable and Linking Format (ELF, formerly called Extensible Linking Format) is a common standard file format for executables, object code, shared libraries, and core dumps. First published in the System V Application Binary Interface specification,[1] and later in the Tool Interface Standard,[2] it was quickly accepted among different vendors of Unix systems. In 1999 it was chosen as the standard binary file format for Unix and Unix-like systems on x86 by the 86open project.
Unlike many other proprietary executable file formats, ELF is very flexible and extensible, and it is not bound to any particular processor or architecture. This has allowed it to be adopted by many different operating systems on many different platforms.
Today the ELF format has replaced older executable formats such as a.out and COFF in many Unix-like operating systems such as: Linux, Solaris, IRIX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, Syllable and HP-UX (except for 32-bit PA-RISC programs which continue to use SOM). ELF has also seen some adoption in non-Unix operating systems, such as the Itanium version of OpenVMS, and BeOS Revision 4 and later for x86 based computers (where it replaced the Portable Executable format, the PowerPC version stayed with Preferred Executable Format). The PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii and GP2X consoles also use ELF and the Nintendo DS and Nintendo GameCube consoles use ELF variants as their executable file format. AmigaOS 4.0 and MorphOS also running on PowerPC machines, use ELF. On the Amiga platform the ELF executable has replaced the previous EHF (Extended Hunk Format) which was used on Amigas equipped with PPC processor expansion cards. The Symbian OS v9 uses E32Image[3] format that is based on ELF file format.
Most Sony Ericsson (for example, the w800i,w610,k790 etc), some Siemens (SGOLD and SGOLD2 platforms: from Siemens C65 to S75 and BenQ-Siemens E71/EL71) and Motorola (for example, the E398) phones can run ELF files through the use of a patch that adds assembly code to the main firmware (Known as the ELFPack, in the underground modding culture).
The ELF file format is also used as a generic object and executable format for binary images used with embedded processors

COFF - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

COFF - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Common Object File Format (COFF) is a specification of a format for executable, object code, and shared library computer files used on Unix systems. It was introduced in Unix System V, and formed the basis for extended specifications such as XCOFF and ECOFF, before being largely replaced by ELF, introduced with SVR4. COFF and its variants continue to be used on some Unix-like systems and on Microsoft Windows."

COFF - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

COFF - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Common Object File Format (COFF) is a specification of a format for executable, object code, and shared library computer files used on Unix systems. It was introduced in Unix System V, and formed the basis for extended specifications such as XCOFF and ECOFF, before being largely replaced by ELF, introduced with SVR4. COFF and its variants continue to be used on some Unix-like systems and on Microsoft Windows."

List of mobile phone standards - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

List of mobile phone standards - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "List of mobile phone standards
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

A list of Mobile phone standards or generations is given in the table below.
3GPP Family
GSM (2G)

* GPRS
* EDGE (EGPRS)
o EDGE Evolution
* CSD
o HSCSD

UMTS (3G)

* UTRA-FDD or Wideband CDMA (WCDMA)
* HSPA
o HSDPA
o HSUPA
o HSPA+
* UMTS-TDD
o TD-CDMA
o TD-SCDMA
* FOMA

3GPP Release 8 (4G)

* LTE

3GPP2 Family
cdmaOne (2G)
CDMA2000 (3G)

* EV-DO

UMB (Pre-4G)
AMPS Family
AMPS (1G)

* TACS / ETACS

D-AMPS (2G)
Other Technologies
Pre Cellular

* PTT
* MTS
* IMTS
* AMTS
* OLT
* MTD
* Autotel / PALM
* ARP

1G

* NMT
* Hicap
* CDPD
* Mobitex
* DataTAC

2G

* iDEN
* PDC
* CSD
* PHS
* WiDEN

Pre-4G

* iBurst"

Apple 2.0: Bandwidth 101: Why the iPhone Is So Slow

Apple 2.0: Bandwidth 101: Why the iPhone Is So Slow

Apple 2.0: Want a 3G iPhone for Christmas?

Apple 2.0: Want a 3G iPhone for Christmas?

For a primer on the difference between 2G and 3G cellphones, see Bandwidth 101: Why the iPhone Is So Slow.)

OraFAQ Forum: SQL & PL/SQL => ora-12705 - Invalid or unknown NLS parameter value specified

OraFAQ Forum: SQL & PL/SQL => ora-12705 - Invalid or unknown NLS parameter value specified: "if your getting Ora-12705 error then unset NLS_LANG parameter.



You try to remove the environment variable NLS_LANG. Then log again.
Where exactly do I have to delete NLS_LANG under ORACLE folder in the registry or is it in more then one location.

In the registry.

In environment variables.




on linux
export NLS_LANG=

on windows
set NLS_LANG=





----

Resolving the ORA-12705 error

Resolving the ORA-12705 error:

Question:

My Oracle database allows me to connect with TOAD, Oracle Enterprise Manager and SQL Developer, but when I try to connect to Oracle from my Windows PC with the MS SQL Server Reporting Services I can connect OK with the Report Designer, but when I try to connect to Oracle from the SQL Server Report Manager I get the ORA-12705 error message: ORA-12705: invalid or unknown NLS parameter value specified


Answer:

you need to locate the Oracle directory in the registry and find NLS_LANG. This variab
It's likely a missing NLS-LANG setting in your Windows PC client registry. The NLS_LANG variable is in the Home0 directory in the Windows registry is not the only NLSle may be set to 'NA', and a change to AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P15 may fix your connectivity issue."