Google  acknowledging turning 10 this month with a special Google 10th Birthday web site. It features a cool interactive timeline where you can click on various events in the company’s history and get more information, along with a new ” Project 10¹⁰⁰ (10 to The power 100)” challenge for ideas to improve the world and an invitation for anyone to share stories about Google.

Google’s also using its birthday to kickoff Project 10¹⁰⁰(a derivative of the word “googol” meaning 10 to the power of 100), a project seeking ideas on how to improve communities, employment opportunities, energy issues, the environment, health issues, education, shelter and housing problems or anything else. Five final ideas will be selected, with Google pledging $10 million in funding to them.

Google’s inviting people to submit written stories (100 words or less) or videos of how they use Google.

Google Audio Indexing(GAudi) is a new technology from Google that allows users to better search and watch videos from various YouTube . It uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken.

The returned videos are ranked based on the spoken content.
The interface is attractive because you can find all the mentions of your keywords and go directly to the appropriate sequence. And if you find an interesting video, there’s another search box that lets you search inside that video.

Microsoft Corp kicked off a $300 million marketing campaignon Thursday, aimed at improving the image of its Windows Vista operating system and strike back at Apple Inc’s “Mac vs. PC” ads.

The first commercial of Microsoft’s new marketing push, being created by advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, aired on Thursday featuring comedian Jerry Seinfeld and company co-founder Bill Gates at a shoe store.

Despite selling more than 180 million licenses since its launch in 2007, Windows Vista continues to suffer from the perception that the operating system is clunky and hard to use compared with Apple computers.

That image has been stoked by Apple’s “Mac vs. PC” ads featuring a geeky and unfashionable PC guy unable to keep up with a better-looking, hip Mac counterpart.

“What the brand stands for, particularly in the case of Windows Vista, has been defined by the competitors. The time is now for us to get in and start telling our story,” said Brad Brooks, a corporate vice president at Microsoft.

Texas Instruments commemorated the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit with the opening Friday of Kilby Labs, honoring Jack Kilby, the Nobel-prize-winning inventor of the seminal electronic device.

As a new TI employee in 1958, Kilby was forced to work during the traditional company summer vacation. During that time, he built the first integrated circuit, now the basic building block of everything from 3G cell phones to supercomputers.

The first IC was crude: a sliver of germanium with protruding wires glued to a glass slide. When Kilby applied electricity to the circuit, “an unending sine wave undulated across his oscilloscope screen. In that instant…he had successfully integrated all of the parts of an electronic circuit onto a single device made from the same semiconductor material,” according to TI’s Web site.

Robert Noyce, who co-founded Intel, also created an integrated circuit, about six months after Kilby. At that time, Noyce was at Fairchild Semiconductor (which he also co-founded). Noyce’s chip, made of silicon, overcame some practical problems that Kilby’s germanium-based device did not.

Kilby won the inventor’s “Triple Crown”: the Nobel Prize in physics; the National Medal of Science; and the National Medal of Technology. He held more than 60 patents including one for the portable electronic calculator, which TI invented in 1967. He died in 2005 at the age of 81 after a battle with cancer.

Microsoft said on Monday that it now plans to offer its server virtualization product for free.

Ahead of a virtualization event in Redmond, Wash., Microsoft said that its Hyper-V Server 2008 will be released within 30 days and be available at no cost via the Web. The software maker had planned to charge $28 for the product.

Also on Monday, Microsoft plans to show off a live migration feature that will be part of the next version of its Hyper-V virtualization technology. Live migration allows companies to move a running virtual machine from one server to another.

The feature will be part of Windows Server R2, Microsoft said Monday. The software maker had originally intended to make Live Migration part of the first Hyper-V product, but pulled the feature in order to try to make its shipping deadline.

Microsoft also said that major computer makers note that nearly all of their customers who order Windows Server 2008-based systems are opting to include Hyper-V. Microsoft finalized the Hyper-V code back in June.

Source: Cnet

An inline search bar in chrome known as the Omnibox, by default  has only 5 suggestions.
But with a simple command line switch we can increase  number of suggestions.
Normally in the Omnibox you’ll see 5 suggestions:

By adding simple command line switch  to the shortcut we can increase this number.

-Create a shortcut of chrome.

-open up the properties for your Google Chrome icon, and add the following
switch to the end of the Target  line (have a space between them).

-omnibox-popup-count=10

For example, your target using a -omnibox-popup-count=10 switch might look like:

“C:\Documents and Settings\Techbray\….\chrome.exe” -omnibox-popup-count=10

Now when ever you launch Chrome with this shortcut, you’ll see more suggestions in the list.

Speed up browsing by disabling functionality. When you want to surf Flash-free,
Java-free, or even Javascript-free (even though that’s not really the point of
Chrome, but whatever), there’s a list of -disable Chrome startup switches that
can block plug-ins, content, or features you don’t want, like:

-disable-dev-tools
-disable-hang-monitor
-disable-images
-disable-java
-disable-javascript
-disable-logging
-disable-metrics
-disable-metrics-reporting
-disable-plugins
-disable-popup-blocking
-disable-prompt-on-repost