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Installation of Windows 7 through a USB drive makes a lot of sense. For one, its a much faster process than installing from a DVD. Also, it becomes a lot easier for those with tiny Netbooks or laptops without an optical drive. What’s more, you get to keep your installation file on your hard drive, eliminating the need for third part softwares to make ISO images and infringing copyright. Its quite simple, really, Microsoft released the open source USB/DVD download tool that creates a bootable USB stick from a Windows 7 install DVD. “As we previously explained, the testing and localization took longer than we expected, but the project is now hosted on CodePlex.com, Microsoft’s Open Source software project hosting repository, and the code can be found here,” explained Peter Galli, Open Source Community Manager for Microsoft. “Also, as a result of some necessary changes, while the user experience of the tool will be the same as before, the install involves additional steps. Originally, for the convenience of customers, we aggregated together additional files, which are separate freestanding executables.” Galli added. In case you’re interested, you can head over to the Microsoft Store to buy the tool. As we reported earlier, China is pirating Windows 7 which is uploaded on USB drives sold for a paltry 98 yuan, or about $14 (Rs 670). The pen drive in question here is the Netac U208 8GB USB drive and features Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s signature on the outside.

Moreover, this card brings several overclocked frequencies-700MHZ for the GPU and 4600MHZ for the memory and supports DirectX11, CrossFirex and ATI Eyefinity. This is expected to be available from November 3rd and the price of the card hasn’t yet been announced.

Source; VHXN

Canon revealed the new Canon EOS-1D Mark IV the professional DSLR camera with high speed and designed for photographers professional to capture the moment with high resolution split in a second under many challenge condition.

The Canon EOS-1D Mark IV is ideally for shooting the action, sport, news event and wildlife photography. It’s featuring new Canon 16.1M pixel APS-H CMOS sensor, 45-point Auto Focus (AF) with 39 f/2.8 sensitive corss-type points, wide selection of precise focus area.

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Livescribe has just announced the new Pulse Smartpen. It is a computer in a pen that digitally captures and syncs handwriting and audio together. It comes in the storage capacity of 4GB and 2GB in a new stylish titanium color.

The 4GB model can hold over 400 hours of audio. The Pulse has an InfraRed camera for capturing handwriting, built-in microphone for voice recording, built-in speaker for audio playback, an OLED display showing the status of voice recorder and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The 2GB and 4GB Pulse Smartpen are priced at $169.95 and $199.95 respectively.

Today, Microsoft Pakistan held the launching ceremony of Windows 7 at the Sheraton Hotel, Karachi. The event was kick started at 08:45 AM. The event was titled as The New Efficiency – Windows 7 Launch. Huge audience attended the event ranging from IT professionals, executives, enterprise businessmen and also bloggers.

Mr. Kamal Ahmed, Country GM, Microsoft Pakistan addressed the keynote on the launch of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010. The motive of launching three new products is to help businesses meet their challenges and attract customers back to the Microsoft brand. No doubt, these products have received good reviews and will help maximize the potential of consumers.

The other prominent people who spoke at the event were Mr. Zafar Ul Islam, Enterprise Technology Strategist, Microsoft Pakistan who delivered a keynote on The New Efficiney – Joint Business Launch Event and Ms. Salma Nisar, Account Technology Strategist, Microsoft Pakistan who talked about The Value of Optimized Desktop.

A separate bloggers corner was also setup from where the bloggers reported live about the proceedings of the event using just their iPhones,

Check out the pictures from the launching ceremony of Windows 7 below:

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Once the third most visited domain on the Internet, the now ailing GeoCities will shut down permanently on October 26.

GeoCities was founded in 1994 and was one of the first services offering an easy to use interface, which allowed ‘mum and dad’ users to publish their own websites easily.

GeoCities was considered revolutionary for its time, being one of the first free hosting services on the internet and one of the first to sort domains via their topic, e.g. finance, travel or fashion.

Unfortunately, as the popularity of GeoCities took off the topics available for hosting became many, and the site increased in complexity. The purchase of GeoCities by Yahoo in 1999 only served to make this growing problem even greater. As the dot-bomb of the early noughties took hold, and personal web hosting became affordable, the writing was on the wall for the future of the business.

By April 2009, Yahoo ceased accepting new registrations for the GeoCities service. In June, the company announced that the service would finally be closed in October this year. That day has come.

Digital archiver, Jason Scott has been working tirelessly to backup as much of the service’s content as possible before its closure, which is estimated to be around 10 Terabytes of data.

In reminiscing of the service, Scott said, “…for hundreds of people, this was their first website…Your pet subject or conspiracy theory or collection of writings left the safe confines of your Windows 3.1 box and became something you could walk up to any internet-connected user, hand them the URL, and know they would be able to see your stuff. In full colour. Right now.”

A golden milestone in Internet history, now gone forever.

Source: NeoWin

EID MUBARAK TO ALL THE MUSLIMS ALL OVER THE WORLD!

Microsoft has now unveiled its next version of their decision engine, Bing Visual Search. The new Visual Search, powered by Silverlight, lets users scroll through galleries of images using specific keywords.

Users can browse in the visual search by products, sports, consumer electronics, famous people, entertainment, reference and many more categories. The updated search makes it easier for users to find what they are looking for through the stylish 3D flip image layout.

Bing now helps users sort through their choices by “Most popular on Bing”, eliminating choices for you to help decide on what to buy. The decision engine can now help expand your search by taking your queries and turning out wider results. Bing will take queries such as “NFL Players” or “MLB Players” and locate as many results of player’s images by face. Bing can also help narrow down user’s queries by sorting players by position, team, salaries and more.

Bing Visual Search requires Microsoft Silverlight to be installed to use the newest version of Bing.

Test out the new beta of Bing at http://www.bing.com/visualsearch

The popularity of social networking sites such as the giant Facebook and its baby brother Twitter is something which can be hard to quantify in terms of figures. Perhaps the best way to do so is to use the site yourself and see if indeed, it changes the way you live your life in the way it seems to have changed others.

Facebook for example, is particularly popular at universities where societies and organizations need a free infrastructure to manage social and university events, it is these functions – amongst others which have rocketed Facebook into the big time.

Both Twitter and Facebook have had their ups and downs since their respective launches – DDOS attacks galore and some bad press regarding some members of the user base have meant that some difficult moralistic decisions have had to be made, despite this popularity has grown and grown.

News is being reported today with some foretasted figures regarding Twitter’s user base, the result is somewhat unsurprising. According to the latest research from eMarketer, that number will be at around 18 million by the end of 2009. But how many of these users are ones who wake up especially early to tweet their thoughts and news to the rest of the tweeters on Twitter?

eMarketer considers ‘users’ as people who access Twitter via any platform – Web, client, mobile or otherwise – at least once per month. Perhaps a benchmark which many might consider to be especially irregular in terms of the amount the service is used. The study is pertinent to the US only and the research firm calls its estimates ‘conservative’ in light of other stats that show Twitter has a high abandonment rate, according to Mashable.com

The numbers are fifty percent higher the estimates that eMarketer made earlier this year, when they projected that Twitter would have just 12 million users at the close of 2009. On this basis, onwards to predictions during 2010 – the current estimate is for 26 million users. A clear sign that the tiny Twitter might well be outgrowing its baby clothes.