You will get your certificate of participation too. I got my certificate

Click here to Send your names to Mars

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The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has mandated that from 1st Aug 2009 all online credit card transactions require an extra level of verification. Your credit card issuing banks are therefore, implementing a "Verified by VISA" or "MasterCard SecureCode" password.

You will need this password to continue transacting online from 1st Aug 2009.

What is the "Verified by VISA"/"MasterCard SecureCode" password?

This is the password that your credit card issuing Bank provides. For example – ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Citibank, HSBC Bank, Axis Bank, SBI etc. This password is the additional layer of security for all your online transactions.

Benefits of "Verified by VISA"/"MasterCard SecureCode" password.

Even if you lose / misplace your credit card it cannot be misused online as the password is not present on the card.

How do I get this ‘extra password’?

All you have to do is log on to your bank’s website, register your card for Verified by Visa (or MasterCard SecureCode) and get your password. Each bank has its own process for card registration. So, hop on to your bank’s website and register now:

HDFC Bank
ICICI Bank
Citibank
HSBC Bank

Standard Chartered
State Bank of India
Axis Bank
ABN Amro

Deutsche Bank
Karur Vysya Bank

What if my bank does not support Verified by Visa / MasterCard SecureCode?

The RBI notification concerns cards issued within India only. If your card is issued outside India, your online transactions will go through even without this extra authentication step (unless your Card Issuer requires SecureCode/VbV authenrtication). If your card is issued in India, we suggest you look for a new bank!

What about American Express cards?

For Amex cards the ‘extra level of authentication’ will work slightly differently. On the payment step at Cleartrip, you will be asked to enter you billing address, which will be passed on to the bank. This will be checked against your billing address the bank has on its records. If the addresses don’t match your payment will be rejected. This technology is called AVS – Address Verification System. Please check your credit card statement if you don’t remember your exact billing address.

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Installation

First thing I noticed is the graphics, a cool installer background image. From windows vista onwards, installation is not a big task, need to set few regional and account information and the partition (and GUI tool for managing partition).

Started installation at 1AM and got my desktop at 1.15. So installation took only 15mnts.

7 GB for windows 7 files

Booting and shutdown

I got my login screen in 32sec and then the desktop in 13sec. So the total booting time is 45sec. But this is without any additional applications. This will change when we install other applications. Shutdown time is around 13sec… Starting windows screen is a new animation screen showing windows and login screen got a new background image.
Other big change is in the taskbar, it can be compare with the dock in mac. It groups items and shows preview of all the items on mouse over. Windows media player can be controlled from the preview itself. We can control the system tray icons from the “Notification area icons” in control panel.

My computer properties

My system rating

Desktop

Design, Graphics & Other Improvements

Design and graphics have a significant change in windows 7. Up to windows vista, the 1st thing i do after installation is disabling all the animations and effects. Even though windows vista have aero theme, it is not much impressive especially in transparency and all. But in windows 7, animations and other screen effects are good. I am not feeling to disable those effects especially its transparency.
We can easily change the aero colour settings; new slide show enabled desktop background with some new background theme sets like Windows 7, Architecture, characters, scenes, nature etc..

Ms paint toolbar

Another change is in the MS paint, it got new ribbon style tool bar and some new additional tools.
I wonder why they are not updated the notepad, it is still the same
They have also added some new sound themes and in that my favorite theme is Raga.

New wallpaper themes

New sound themes

Speed, Stability & Compatibility

I am feeling a lot of speed change in windows 7 compared to Vista. Booting, application loading time are faster in Windows 7.
I have installed only few basic applications in windows 7, so i can’t talk much about Speed, Stability & Compatibility. I installed MS office, winzip, Acrobat reader, multimedia codec and other basic home applications. All those applications are working fine. I tried to install AVG free and Norton internet security 2009, both have known compatibility issues but Norton is running. I want to install and try other development applications when I get time.

Preview in taskbar

Controll panel- All items. Some new features added

Windows-7-RC2 Booting image

This is a basic review of Windows 7 RC or say first look. I didn’t get much time to review in deep so i didn’t get any bugs . I will try the new features and post it when i get time. Please share  you experience

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It is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform((Gecko is the second most-popular layout engine on the World Wide Web Written in    C++,currently developed by Mozilla Corporation)). Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, performance improvements and user interface.

Features includes:

• Available in 70 languages.
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for the HTML 5 audio and video elements.
• Supports HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.
• The HTML 5 drag and drop API allows support for dragging and dropping items within and between web sites.
• Downloadable fonts support
• HTML 5 text API for canvas elements

Itz still beta and have many bugs. If you are ready to help them, download it and report the bugs .

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In the fields of chronology and periodization, an epoch means an instant in time chosen as the origin of a particular era. The “epoch” then serves as a reference point from which time is measured. Time measurement units are counted from the epoch so that the date and time of events can be specified unambiguously.

On Friday, February 13th 2009, 23:31:30 UTC, it will be exactly 1,234,567,890 seconds since the beginning of Epoch Time, which was on midnight of January 1, 1970. So it’s the time for Unix nerds to celebrate 1234567890

And here’s a site that’s counting down to that momentous event: http://coolepochcountdown.com/

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To customize your inbox, go to the Themes tab under Settings. They will be rolling out themes to everyone over the next couple of days, so if you don’t see them yet, check back soon.

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User experience

• Easier password management. An information bar at the top of the browser window now appears to allow you to save passwords after a successful login.
• Simplified add-on installation. You can now install extensions from third-party download sites in fewer clicks, thanks to the removal of the add-on download site whitelist.
• New Download Manager. The download manager makes it easier to locate your downloaded files.
• Resumable downloads. You can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.
• Full page zoom. From the View menu and using keyboard shortcuts, you can now zoom in and out on the content of entire pages — this scales not just the text but the layout and images as well.
• Tab scrolling and quickmenu. Tabs are easier to locate with the new tab scrolling and tab quickmenu features.
• Save what you were doing. Firefox 3 prompts you to see if you’d like to save your current tabs when you exit Firefox.
• Optimized Open in Tabs behavior. Opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs instead of replacing the existing ones.
• Easier to resize location and search bars. You can now easily resize the location and search bars using a simple resize handle between them.
• Text selection improvements. You can now select multiple ranges of text using the Control (Command on Macintosh) key. Double-clicking and dragging now selects in “word-by-word” mode. Triple-clicking selects an entire paragraph.
• Find toolbar. The Find toolbar now opens with the current selection.
• Plugin management. Users can now disable individual plugins in the Add-on Manager.
• Integration with Windows Vista. Firefox’s menus now display using Vista’s native theme.
• Integration with Mac OS X. Firefox now supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates.
• Star button. The new star button in the location bar lets you quickly add a new bookmark with a single click. A second click lets you file and tag your new bookmark.
• Tags. You can now associate keywords with your bookmarks to easily sort them by topic.
• Location bar and auto-complete. Type the title or tag of a page in the location bar to quickly find the site you were looking for in your history and bookmarks. Favicons, bookmark, and tag indicators help you see where the results are coming from.
• Smart Bookmarks folder. Firefox’s new Smart Bookmarks folder offers quick access to your recently bookmarked and tagged places, as well as pages you visit frequently.
• Bookmarks and History Organizer. The new unified bookmarks and history organizer lets you easily search your history and bookmarks with multiple views and smart folders for saving your frequent searches.
• Web-based protocol handlers. Web applications, such as your favorite web mail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is provided for other protocols as well. (Note that web applications do have to register themselves with Firefox before this will work.)
• Easy to use Download Actions. A new Applications preferences pane provides an improved user interface for configuring handlers for various file types and protocol schemes.
• Improved look and feel. Graphics and font handling have been improved to make web sites look better on your screen, including sharper text rendering and better support for fonts with ligatures and complex scripts. In addition, Mac and Linux (Gnome) users will find that Firefox feels more like a native application for their platform than ever, with a new, native, look and feel.
• Color management support. By setting the gfx.color_management.enabled preference in [about:config], you can ask Firefox to use the color profiles embedded in images to adjust the colors to match your computer’s display.
• Offline support. Web applications can take advantage of new features to support being used even when you don’t have an Internet connection.

Security and privacy

• One-click site information. Want to know more about the site you’re visiting? Click the site’s icon in the location bar to see who owns it. Identify information is prominently displayed and easier than ever to understand.
• Malware protection. Firefox 3 warns you if you arrive at a web site that is known to install viruses, spyware, trojans, or other dangerous software (known as malware). You can see what the warning looks like by clicking here.
• Web forgery protection enhanced. Now when you visit a page that’s suspected of being a forgery, you’re shown a special page instead of the contents of the page with a warning. Click here to see what it looks like.
• Easier to understand SSL errors. The errors presented when an invalid SSL certificate is encountered have been clarified to make it easier to understand what the problem is.
• Out-of-date add-on protection. Firefox 3 now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and disables older, insecure versions.
• Secure add-on updates. Add-on update security has been improved by disallowing add-ons that use an insecure update mechanism.
• Anti-virus integration. Firefox 3 now informs anti-virus software when executable files are downloaded.
• Windows Vista parental controls support. Firefox 3 supports the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

Performance

• Reliability. Firefox 3 now stores bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences in a transactionally secure database format. This means your data is protected against loss even if your system crashes.
• Speed. Firefox 3 has gotten a performance boost by completely replacing the part of the software that handles drawing to your screen, as well as to how page layout work is handled.
• Memory use reduced. Firefox 3 is more memory efficient than ever, with over 300 memory “leak” bugs fixed and new features to help automatically locate and dispose of leaked memory blocks.

I installed FF3 in my Vista machine and itz really cool. I can feel the improved performance, especially the memory taken by firefox process. Some of the addsons are updated automatically, but some of them need manual updation.

DOWNLOAD FF3

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Finally the iPhone 3G is officially released.

The main features are 3G, thinner edges, full plastic back, flush headphone jack, and the iPhone 2.0 firmware .They’re also making sure it’s available all over internationally, works with enterprises, runs 3rd party apps… and does it all for cheaper. Apple claims its 3G speeds trounce the competition, with pageloads 36% faster than the N95 and Treo 750 — and of course it completely trounces the old EDGE data. Battery life isn’t getting put out to pasture though, with 300 hours of standby, 8-10 hours of 2G talk, 5 hours of 3G talk, 7 hours of video and 24 hours of audio. GPS is also a go. Apple is using A-GPS, which supplements regular satellite GPS data with info from cellular towers. WiFi data is also worked into the mix, which should give users a pretty solid lock on where the heck they are on this planet.
Apple hopes to launch in 70 countries this year. 8GB is available for $199, 16GB for $299 — and the 16GB comes in white. Both pricepoints require a contract.

iPhone is relasing in 25 countries in this July 11. It will be available in India through Vodafone. But the releasing date not not yet fixed. Here is the iPhone India Site http://www.apple.co.in/iphone/

For more details visit http://www.apple.com/

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What is Download Day?

Download Day is Mozilla’s attempt to set a world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours and will occur on Firefox 3 launch day.

When is Download Day?

Download Day will coincide with the general availability of Firefox 3. The clock will start ticking when Firefox 3 goes out the door! They don’t have a definitive date for Firefox 3 yet, but it should be in June.

How do I take part in the record?

It’s simple–just download Firefox 3 as soon as it is available, preferably from Download Day Headquarters. You’ll get a customized certificate by downloading from Headquarters.

How will I know it’s time to download Firefox 3?

Please provide your email address when pledging to download Firefox 3 and they’ll send you reminder emails and notify you of the exact date. Or, you can check back at Download Day Headquarters for an update or follow “mozillafirefox” on Twitter for status.

Yes, I pledged to get Firefox 3 during Download Day to set the Guinness World Record for Most Software Downloaded in 24 Hours.

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