WinMerge is a visual text comparison application, that allows you to see the highlighted differences between 2 text based files. It is in particular useful for comparing source codes, and offers optional support for Visual SourceSafe syntax highlighting, customizable highlight colors and more. The program allows you to go through all found differences and then merge each instance by either replacing them on the right or the left side.
Web site PDF Online lets you convert a bevy of document types to PDF online, sending the resulting PDF to your email address as an attachment.While PDF Online doesn't convert everything, it does handle a lot of file types (see screenshot), and might come in handy if you need a quick PDF on-the-go. In fact, even if you "Print to PDF" a lot on your desktop, PDF Online might be a nice tool to keep in mind, especially if you email the file to yourself anyway.
| Supported Formats: | ||
| -MS Word (DOC) | -MS Publisher (PUB) | JPG, PNG |
| -MS Word (RTF) | -MS Excel (XLS) | BMP, TIFF |
| -MS PowerPoint (PPT) | -HTML (MHT) | WMF, EMF, GIF |
| -MS PowerPoint (PPS) | -Text (TXT) |
Meebo is a website for instant messaging from absolutely anywhere. Whether you’re at home, on campus, at work, or traveling foreign lands, hop over to www.meebo.com on any computer to access all of your buddies (on AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber) and chat with them, no downloads or installs required, for free!
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. It is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Sun Microsystems pushed out a "near final" version of MySQL 5.1 on Tuesday, but is holding back the production release of the open-source database until it irons out some remaining bugs, officials said Tuesday.
Sun wants to avoid issuing another buggy release of the database, which is what happened when MySQL, which Sun acquired in January, released MySQL 5.0 two years ago, said Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL who is now a senior vice president at Sun.
"When we released MySQL 5.0 it didn't really meet our quality standards," he said Tuesday at the start of the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, California. "With 5.1 we are being much more conservative, much harder on ourselves."
Sun made a "release candidate" of the software available for download on Tuesday. Mickos said it will release the production version by the end of June, or about three months later than planned.
This marks the first MySQL conference since Sun acquired the company in January. MySQL had been planning an initial public offering before Mickos decided to accept Sun's US$1 billion acquisition offer at a dinner with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz last November.
Mickos showed a photo on Tuesday of himself and two other MySQL executives, taken on the beach at sunset in Santa Cruz, California, standing around a fire and ceremoniously burning the IPO documents that they never used.
"We took all those bankers' documents and our stock ticker symbol and everything else and we burned it," he said. "It was a sad moment, but also a moment of leaving things behind" and accepting the company's future as part of Sun.
Sun says the deal makes sense because it will be able to bring its vast sales, engineering and support resources to MySQL. Sun has about 32,000 employees worldwide and MySQL had only 400. Sun also hopes the deal will open new doors for it to sell its server hardware and other products.
Mickos and Schwartz, who also spoke here, sought to emphasize the synergies between the companies. Schwartz said he has been a champion of open-source software since he took over as CEO two years ago last week.
"The number one thing we are working on with Sun now is performance and scale," Mickos said. "We are known as one of the fastest databases, but all our big customers tell us they want more scale."
MySQL already has some very large customers, including Amazon and Google. But such customers typically modify the open-source software to support their large-scale Web applications.
Sun's goal is to add better scale and performance to the official, supported releases of MySQL, and to better support traditional back-end applications where IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are the dominant vendors.
My SQL 5.1 adds some of those capabilities, including table and index partitioning, which will improve query response times; and row-based replication, for faster and more reliable replication. The update also includes an event scheduler that lets administrators automate common SQL tasks.
The release candidate issued Tuesday is not recommended for production use unless a customer needs the new features right away, Mickos said. He said the delay in the release was not related to Sun's acquisition. The release candidate already has fewer bugs than there were in the production release of MySQL 5.0, he said.
Woopra is the world's most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. And it's free! It provides exciting, LIVE data about your visitors as they explore your site. Web site stats might be interesting to those of us who have Web sites, but Woopra makes stats addictive and quite frankly, entertaining. It’s sticky, and if you own a Web site, you’re going to want to have it running on a screen, the same way a day trader keeps a stock ticker and CNBC running non-stop.
Enjoy a rich Web experience with Microsoft Internet Explorer Mobile.SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- Software maker Adobe announced on Tuesday that the company had released a widely anticipated update to harden the security of its ubiquitous Flash Player software and patch previously-disclosed software vulnerabilities.
The update fixed a flaw that security researcher Shane Macaulay used in the PWN2OWN contest at the CanSecWest conference to compromise a fully-patched Windows Vista laptop. The update also revamps the security of the Flash Player to solve several major issues that could serve as a vector of attack, including a DNS rebinding attack that has worried browser makers.
"This is the update we’ve referred to in a couple of earlier posts," the company stated on its blog. "These potential vulnerabilities could allow someone who successfully exploits them to take control of the affected system, so we recommend users update to the latest version of Flash Player."
The company and some security researchers have urged Web developers to rebuild their Flash application to make sure that they still work under the new player and benefit from security fixes in authoring tools.
The latest software can be downloaded from Adobe's Flash Player Download Center or through the programs automated update functionality. Flash developers should read the company's white paper on the changes that could affect current Flash applications.
Facebook is close to putting an uncomfortable and embarrassing legal episode behind it.
A person briefed on the status of dueling lawsuits between Facebook and the competing site ConnectU said on Sunday that Facebook was finalizing a settlement with the founders of ConnectU — brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their colleague, Divya Narendra.
The ConnectU founders were accusing Mark Zuckerberg and the original crew behind Facebook of pilfering their profitable idea back in 2003, when they were all Harvard students. Facebook had filed a countersuit, accusing ConnectU of unfair business practices.
Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. In the meantime, all motions in the case against ConnectU have been terminated.
ConnectU did not immediately respond to an e-mail message requesting comment. A California federal judge had ordered the parties into mediation last year.
The ConnectU founders asserted that they hired Mr. Zuckerberg, then a sophomore at Harvard, in 2003 to help create a campus-wide dating site called Harvard Connection. They say that he stalled on the project for months while nurturing his own idea and ultimately starting TheFacebook.com. The case cast doubts on Mr. Zuckerberg’s ingenuity, and discovery efforts turned up some embarrassing material — like his diary. Facebook clearly needed to make the suit go away before a widely expected initial public offering that could come as early as next year.
A Facebook spokeswoman said the company would not comment on legal matters. But the person briefed on the status of the negotiations said motions to dismiss the cases were expected to be filed “within weeks.”
Later this year, Yahoo expects to have in place the first phase of a new system intended to generate greater revenue from graphical online advertising.
The system, called AMP, is expected to become available in the third quarter of 2008 for newspapers participating with Yahoo in an online ad consortium. But that's just the initial phase. Yahoo says it "plans to extend the functionality of the platform as well as participation to additional publishers, advertisers, agencies, and ad networks through the rest of 2008 and into 2009."
A report Sunday in The New York Times took a somewhat pessimistic view of the timing, saying the system is "still months away from being ready" and pointing to Yahoo's newspaper partners getting going with AMP "in the late summer or in the fall."
AMP is supposed to make it simpler for Yahoo's partners--newspaper and otherwise--to sell online ads across a range of outlets and to focus those ads by say, geography or demographic profile. Eventually it is expected to expand beyond display advertisements to other types of ads, including search and video.
The new ad management platform, Yahoo said in its press release, "will deliver a faster, easier, and more automated and integrated way to create, buy, and sell advertising and do so across a transparent global marketplace."
The AMP pitch comes as Yahoo faces increasing pressure in an unsolicited takeover bid by Microsoft. On Saturday, Microsoft threw down the gauntlet, telling Yahoo it has three weeks in which to "sit down and negotiate a definitive agreement." Failure to comply would spur Redmond to launch a proxy battle for control of Yahoo's board and could bring a lower bid than the initial $31 per share.
A number of times in the weeks since Microsoft launched its courtship, Yahoo has claimed that the software giant has undervalued Yahoo's worth. Never was that more apparent than in mid-March when Yahoo filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying it would double its cash flow by 2010--in part because of the strength of its online advertising efforts.
AMP, previously known as the Advertiser and Publisher Exchange, or Apex, is a combination of technologies developed in-house and through acquisitions such as that of Right Media.
The last time Yahoo worked on a major ad platform, it struggled. The search ad platform known as Panama, eventually debuted about a year ago, and Yahoo executives have expressed satisfaction with its real-world financial returns. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company has between 500 and 700 engineers working on AMP, according to a newspaper partner.
From :CNet News.com Blog
